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The forested area in the tropics continues to decrease. It is a challenge to preserve large areas of tropical forest to counteract the accelerating climate change and loss of biodiversity. The cumulative deforested area (including old clearings and hydroelectric dams) in Amazonia up until 1991 reached 427,000 km2 or 11 % of the 4 million km2 original forested portion of Brazil’s 5 million km2 legal...
Soil degradation is one of the most severe problems of land use in the lowland humid tropics (Zech 1997) largely due to the fact that soil organic matter (SOM) is mineralized rapidly under the optimum growth temperatures for micro-organisms (Tiessen et al. 1994). However, SOM is of particular importance for sustainable agricultural use of the heavily weathered tropical soils. It contributes substantially...
Soil degradation is one of the most serious problems of land use in the tropics, in particular the Neotropics, because the majority of the soils are very old, deeply weathered, and rather infertile (Zech 1997). Under tropical conditions, hydrolysis of primary minerals, for instance, is enhanced by a factor of 100 in comparison to temperate regions (Whitmore 1993). In combination with the high precipitation,...
The abundance of charcoal and highly aromatic humic substances in Amazonian Dark Earths (ADE) suggests that residues of incomplete combustion of organic material (black carbon, pyrogenic carbon, charcoal) are a key factor for the persistence of soil organic matter (SOM) in ADE soils which contain up to 70 times more black carbon than the surrounding soils (Glaser et al. 2001). 13C-NMR studies showed...
Summary and Conclusions If human activities are indeed primarily responsible for the development of the high C contents in ADE, one might expect that cessation of these activities would result in reductions in organic matter content, and an eventual reversion to Ferralsols or whatever soil type makes up the surrounding context of Indian settlements. However, this appears not to be the case. The high...
Summary and Conclusions The organic chemistry of soil organic matter (SOM) in ADEs can be looked at at different scales, depending on the type of interest. At an ecological level, operationally defined SOM fractions with different turnover times and / or stability can be separated and characterized. SOM associated with different particle-size fractions vary in composition and turnover time, the sand...
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