Tropical forests

Silwood Park researchers are addressing the impacts of several of the central threats to tropical forests: logging and fragmentation of forests due to agricultural expansion. A key question is what happens when tropical forests are logged and/or broken up into patches of diminishing size. To answer this question, our researchers set up one of the most intensive ecological observatories in the world in Malaysian Borneo. Since clearing of tropical forests is inevitable in some parts of the world, a key question is how much tropical forest is needed to maintain biodiversity, exactly which patches should be preserved, and how degraded can those patches be. Tropical forests still have secrets that are only beginning to be uncovered.

While the role in carbon dioxide emissions and sequestration have been well studied, Silwood researchers are still uncovering secrets of how tropical forests impact carbon cycling. Recently, they have discovered that tropical forest trees can .emit or sequester methane, a key greenhouse gas, which has largely unknown impacts on global climate models.