I am a tropical forestry engineer, with a master’s degree in Forest Management from Universidad de Los Andes in Venezuela where I worked between 2005 and 2013 fulfilling different roles in teaching and research. In 2019, I completed a PhD in Environmental and Forest Sciences from the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences (SEFS) of the University of Washington, USA. I’ve built my career within the framework of research and education on the topics of forest ecology and forest management. I’m interested in facilitating the use of scientific knowledge for the practice of sustainable forest management. Between 2020 and October 2021, I worked as a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management (ESPM) at the University of California – Berkeley working to understand the effects of drought on the dynamics of tree communities, fuels, and regeneration in the mixed-conifer forests of the Sierra Nevada in California. As of November 2021, I am part of the Global Conservation Program at The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) focusing on the analysis of forest carbon within the Forest and Climate Change team.
High integrity tropical forests are essential for global climate mitigation
E.VILANOVA, T. EVANS, K. AUSTIN, D. ZARIN
Forests and Climate Change Program, Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). 2300 Southern Boulevard Bronx, New York 10460
The cumulative terrestrial CO2 sink since 1850 amounts to 210 ± 45 GtC, or about 31% of total anthropogenic emissions, with recent evidence of an increasing sink in the last four decades but progressively threatened by climate change. Despite its enormous significance, the contribution of different regions and forest types to this global sink has not been well documented, especially in the case of high integrity forests (i.e., those that remain free from significant human degradation). We focus on high integrity forests, given the globally significant ecosystem services they provide across scales from local communities to global society. Here, using a bottom-up approach, we quantify the contribution of these forests to the current tropical terrestrial sink, hypothesizing that these areas are major contributors of the sink, with this function primarily occurring within the largest and least fragmented blocks (Intact Forest Landscapes). Our preliminary estimates of the carbon sink show that if the strength and resilience of the tropical carbon sink is to be maintained to the greatest extent possible, it is essential to halt, and where possible reverse, direct human impacts on high integrity forests. This analysis can help stimulate the actions that are urgently needed to preserve and maintain the ecological integrity of these forests.