Pleistocene and Holocene environmental changes in the Brazilian Amazon region

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Hermann Behling
• Subject Area: Palaeontology
• Term: from 2008 to 2012
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 62482418

Amazonia, which holds the largest rainforest ecosystem on Earth, plays a significant role in global climate, hydrology, carbon cycle, and biodiversity. Despite the importance of the Amazon rainforest to modern and future global environmental change relatively little is known about its past. In this project, late Quaternary environmental dynamics will be investigated using several already available lake and swamp sediment cores from different regions north and south of the equator in Brazilian Amazon region. Multiproxy studies by innovative temporal high resolution pollen, charcoal, isotope and sediment analysis, radiocarbon dating and multivariate data analysis will be applied. Of special interest is the reconstruction of late Pleistocene and Holocene environmental changes from different regions in Amazonia in particular (1) vegetation change and plant diversity dynamics, (2) climate changes including the dynamic of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) and the role of El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events, (4) fire history and its impact on ecosystems as well as (5) past human impact. We want also to study the timing of vegetation and climate change in different regions of Amazonia, its driving forces as well as the response time of vegetation change on variations in precipitation and seasonality. Understanding past environmental change and the ecological response will provide important insights to understand modern and to predict future changes. This project will be an important contribution to the Global Change thematic and will also allow to extent our institute’s collaboration and capacity building between Brazil and Germany. (For the German version see attachments.)

• DFG Programme: Research Grants