Bamboo, climate change and forest use: A critical combination for southwestern Amazonian forests?

Abstract

About 160 000 km 2 of forests in the border zone between Brazil and Peru are dominated by semi-scandent bamboos (Guadua spp.). We argue that both predicted decreased precipitation during the dry season and widespread anthropogenic disturbances will significantly increase the distribution and biomass of bamboos in the area. Seasonal dryness favours the growth of evergreen bamboos in relation to trees that shed their leaves during the dry season. Disturbance can be beneficial for the bamboo because, as a clonal plant, it is often able to recover more rapidly than trees. It also withstands dry season better than many trees. The bamboo life cycle ends in a mass mortality event every 28 years, producing potential fuel for a forest fire. Presently, natural forest fires hardly exist in the area. However, in the projected future climate with more pronounced dry season and with increased fuel load after bamboo die-off events the forests may start to catch fire that has escaped from inhabited areas or even started naturally. Fires can kill trees, thus further increasing the fuel load of the forest. As a result, the landscape may start to convert to a savanna ecosystem.

The interactions between wildfires, bamboo and aerosols in the south-western Amazon: A conceptual model

“…In other research, the number of non-woody stems, including bamboo, increased exponentially with burn severity (Barlow and Peres, 2004). However, fire may not always promote bamboo expansion, because fire occurring immediately after the mass flowering of bamboo will eliminate seedlings that are yet to develop rhizomes (Ferreira et al, 2019).…”

“…These researchers suggested that forest would not be sustained once a critical recurrence interval of 20 years had been passed. In other research, a boomerang curve was hypothesized in which bamboo expanded with moderate recurrence intervals of wildfires, but declined as the recurrence interval decreased (Ferreira et al, 2019). A similar history of bamboo has been discovered in the south-eastern USA (Platt and Brantley, 1997), where bamboo dominated when Native Americans occasionally burned the area, but declined as European settlers changed the fire regime into either more frequent fire or fire suppression.…”

“…This increases flammability and helps with bamboo expansion (Smith and Nelson, 2011), but the increased flammability is compensated for by rainfall in the hydrological cycle. In addition, the ability of bamboo to store water in its rhizomes and internodes (Ferreira et al, 2019) becomes useless. Bamboo-dominated forests retain less soil moisture than forests without bamboo (Griscom and Ashton, 2003), but their strategy to deprive competing species of water does not work well in wet conditions.…”

Growth response of Dendrocalamus asper on elevational variation and intra-clump spacing management

“…The development of bamboo that goes comprehensively will have positive implications in supporting land restoration, the rejuvenation of the national economy, and combating climate change (Choudhury et al 2012;Dwivedi et al 2019;Ferreira et al 2020;Singh et al 2020). Bamboo-based agroforestry is an agroforestry system that is still rarely practiced, yet promising system and increase in trend by combining several commodities (Banik 2015a;Kittur et al 2016;Hani 2020).…”

“…K. Heyne can be used as an option for wood-based products (Chaowana 2013). Furthermore, the wide range of bamboo benefits namely, copper absorber, rehabilitation and phytoremediation plant species, nutrient source, biomass sequestration, and to reduce soil erosion and nutrient leaching (Soejono et al 2013;Nirmala et al 2014;Chua et al 2019;Durai and Long 2019;Go et al 2019;Bian et al 2020). Thus, the large scale of Bamboo (i.e.…”