Late twentieth-century trends in the biomass of Amazonian forest plots

© The Royal Society 2005. All rights reserved. This chapter discusses a previous study by Phillips et al. (1998) on biomass changes in Amazonian permanent sample plots which has been used to infer the presence of a regional carbon sink, generating vigorous debate about sampling and methodological issues. A new analysis of biomass change in old-growth Amazonian forest plots is presented here using new inventory data. It has been found that across fifty-nine sites, the above-ground dry biomass in trees of more than 10 cm in diameter has increased since plot establishment by about 1.22 Mg per hectare per year, or about 0.98 Mg per hectare per year if individual plot values are weighted by the number of hectare years of monitoring. This significant increase is not confounded by spatial or temporal variation in wood specific gravity, nor does it depend on the allometric equation used to estimate biomass. Overall, these results suggest a slightly greater rate of net stand-level change than reported in 1998, and indicate the presence of a significant regional-scale carbon sink in old-growth Amazonian forests during the past two decades.