The biogeochemistry of the Amazon Basin: too little mud, and perhaps too much water The biogeochemistry of the Amazon Basin. Michael McClain, Reynaldo L. Victoria and Jeffrey E. Richey (Eds.). Oxford University Press, 365 pp US$60 ISBN 0-19-511431-0 Published 2001
✍ Scribed by Robert F. Stallard
- Book ID
- 102261849
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2002
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 68 KB
- Volume
- 16
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0885-6087
- DOI
- 10.1002/hyp.5028
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
The Amazon River System is the World's largest river basin, delivering roughly 15-20 of all river water to the ocean, while also acting as a significant component of the atmospheric heat engine, and processing important portions of the biogeochemical cycles of carbon, nitrogen, and other elements. Rivers basins are marvellous setting in which to study biogeochemical processes, because the discharge of water, solutes, and solids is among the most easily measured of all biogeochemical fluxes, and this discharge integrates, albeit imperfectly, over the entire upstream watershed. As such, these discharge measurements represent a form of remote sensing, which permits a landscape-scale characterization of biogeochemical processes when combined with mapped data (perhaps derived from space-based remote sensing) and site-based fieldwork distributed across the river basin.
Most of the Amazon Basin is in a reasonably natural, or at least pre-technological, condition because of historical difficulties in access caused by it great size, dense vegetation, and diseases. This natural state is changing, because of developmental schemes promoted by the governments of the region, the largest being Brazil, and by developmental barons of various sorts. These schemes typically involve road building and the accompanying deforestation. Thus, the Amazon is a good place to watch and speculate about nature being actively replaced by transformed landscapes.
Despite the new roads, the new airports, cell-phone networks, Internet sites, and GPS, access to the Amazon is still difficult for scientists. Now, vast thickets of government red tape wielded by bureaucrats, fuelled by fears of biopiracy, scientific imperialism, and perhaps politically unpopular revelations derived from good data, have replaced trackless forests filled with malaria, yellow fever, and other pestilence. Despite this, the last several decades have seen several ambitious research programs that have endeavoured to unite investigations, often under some acronym: from Brazil, we have the Manaus-based INPA that unites research in the Brazilian Amazon and HiBAM for Amazon Basin hydrology. The US National Science Foundation (NSF) sponsored CAMREX, which focused on mainstem carbon fluxes, and AMASEDS, which focused on estuarine processes in the Amazon Plume. The US NASA funded ABLE and LBA, which endeavoured to examine biosphere-atmosphere interactions. The French IRD/ORSTOM sponsored programs in Bolivia and Brazil. The Germans have worked in Amazonia for many decades, and