Woods Hole Research Center

Community Forestry and Sustainable Livelihoods along Brazil’s Tapajós River:

Community forestry is widely regarded as a promising strategy through which smallholders can increase income and improve quality of life, while conserving local forest resources. One such initiative is the Caboclo Workshops of the Tapajós. This approach combines small-scale, technologically and organizationally simple production of high quality finished products for green consumer markets. Since the early 2000s, the Woods Hole Research Center and the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM) have worked with traditional communities on the shores of the Tapajós River to develop forest management systems supplying local furniture workshops.

Feedbacks between Water and Deforestation in Tropical South America:

Tropical South America contains the world’s largest continuous tropical forest and savannah ecosystems. This region is environmentally important not only because of traditional ecological measures, such as its high biodiversity, but also because it generates more than one-quarter of the world’s river discharge. Taken together, a local decrease in evaporation and a large-scale decrease in rainfall may have profound effects on human and environmental water needs, such as agriculture, hydropower, drinking water, aquatic and terrestrial biodiversity, and fisheries. Woods Hole Research Center scientists are leading projects in the Amazon to better understand the consequences of these changes.

Fire and Carbon Sequestration in Boreal North America:

One focus for Woods Hole Research Center scientists studying boreal North America explores how carbon sequestration rates following fire vary across the entire boreal forest region on an inter-annual basis. This work requires accurate measurements of carbon fluxes at fine spatial and temporal scales over large areas. Field studies bring WHRC researchers to a number of different locations throughout the North American boreal region. Conducting research in northern, southern, and central boreal zones allows the observation of ecosystem processes across a wider range of landscape types, and allows for a more comprehensive understanding of the North American boreal system.

Promoting Good Land Stewardship through the Registry of Social-Environmental Responsibility:

The Registry of Socio-environmental Responsibility (RSR) is an initiative of the Aliança da Terra (AT), the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM), and the Woods Hole Research Center (WHRC) that unifies property owners who commit to responsible land stewardship in Brazil. Begun in 2006, the RSR creates a link between the growing demands for responsible land use practices coming from commodity markets and demands from the emerging carbon market for reductions in carbon emissions from deforestation.

Understanding Fire in the Brazilian Amazon:

Fire is an important agent of transformation in the Amazon landscape. Since 2004, the Woods Hole Research Center has been conducting experimental burns to study the characteristics of fire in the transitional forest on the edge of the Amazon rainforest and the ecological damage they cause. The goal of this research is to better understand what role fire may play in reshaping the landscape of this region, which lies at the transition zone between the tall dense rainforests at the core of the Amazon and the savannas of central Brazil.

Understanding Human Impacts on the Chesapeake Bay:

The Chesapeake Bay is the largest estuary in North America, encompassing a 168,000 sq. kilometer watershed that covers parts of six states and the District of Columbia. The mixing of salt and freshwater in the Bay creates a diverse and complex ecosystem, which historically has supported thousands of migratory and resident species, including oysters, blue crabs, shad, herring, and waterfowl. The numbers of fish and wildlife that the Bay once supported has diminished drastically due in part to overharvesting and disease, but pollution from urban runoff, agriculture, and inadequate sewage treatment has caused a serious decline in water quality. Because the conversion of natural resource lands to developed land cover poses a significant threat to the Chesapeake Bay, Woods Hole Research Center scientists have focused efforts on simulating and predicting urban and suburban land use change.

Understanding the Forest Carbon Cycle in Harvard Forest:

Forests are an important component of the global carbon cycle. Each year, they withdraw carbon from the atmosphere through photosynthesis and release it to the atmosphere through both plant and microbial respiration. The processes of photosynthesis and respiration are strongly affected by climatic conditions, particularly temperature and precipitation. With a changing global climate, the role forests play in the uptake and release of carbon could be altered. At the Harvard Forest, in western Massachusetts, Woods Hole Research Center scientists are measuring soil respiration and examining the effects of climatic variables through long term plots and amendment experiments.