Kolloquium: Andreas Huth

Forests play an important role in the global carbon cycle as they store large amounts of carbon. Understanding the dynamics of forests is an important issue for ecology and climate change research. In this presentation we will give an overview on the knowledge on tropical forests and their carbon balance. We will explain typical methods to model forests and their dynamics.

Using an individual based forest model (FORMIND) we developed an approach to simulate dynamics of around 410 billion individual trees within 7.8 Mio km² of Amazon forests. We combined the simulations with remote sensing observations from Lidar in order to detect different forest states and structures caused by natural and anthropogenic disturbances. Under current conditions, we identified the Amazon rainforest as a carbon sink, gaining 0.56 Gt C per year. We found that successional states play an important role for the relations between productivity and biomass. Simulated values can be compared to observed local carbon fluxes.