Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
Cited by 264

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 43 of the 43 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

The changing Amazon forest

Open access
Phillips, Oliver L, Lewis, Simon L, Baker, Timothy R, Chao, Kuo-Jung, Higuchi, Niro·2008·Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

Abstract

Long-term monitoring of distributed, multiple plots is the key to quantify macroecological patterns and changes. Here we examine the evidence for concerted changes in the structure, dynamics and composition of old-growth Amazonian forests in the late twentieth century. In the 1980s and 1990s, mature forests gained biomass and underwent accelerated growth and dynamics, all consistent with a widespread, long-acting stimulation of growth. Because growth on average exceeded mortality, intact Amazonian forests have been a carbon sink. In the late twentieth century, biomass of trees of more than 10 cm diameter increased by 0.62±0.23 t C ha −1 yr −1 averaged across the basin. This implies a carbon sink in Neotropical old-growth forest of at least 0.49±0.18 Pg C yr −1 . If other biomass and necromass components are also increased proportionally, then the old-growth forest sink here has been 0.79±0.29 Pg C yr −1 , even before allowing for any gains in soil carbon stocks. This is approximately equal to the carbon emissions to the atmosphere by Amazon deforestation. There is also evidence for recent changes in Amazon biodiversity. In the future, the growth response of remaining old-growth mature Amazon forests will saturate, and these ecosystems may switch from sink to source driven by higher respiration (temperature), higher mortality (as outputs equilibrate to the growth inputs and periodic drought) or compositional change (disturbances). Any switch from carbon sink to source would have profound implications for global climate, biodiversity and human welfare, while the documented acceleration of tree growth and mortality may already be affecting the interactions among millions of species.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1098/rstb.2007.0033

Cites

43 of 43 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 43 references

Cited by

See all 264

Metadata

Authors
Phillips, O. L., Lewis, S. L., Baker, T. R., Chao, K.-J., & Higuchi, N.
Venue
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
Published
2008-02-11
Volume
363
Issue
1498
Pages
1819-1827
ISSN
  • 0962-8436 (ISSN-L)
  • 1471-2970
OpenAlex
W2102862797
Cited by
264
References
43
FWCI
24.30
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
hybrid

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The changing Amazon forest. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1098/rstb.2007.0033
The paper
Phillips, O. L., Lewis, S. L., Baker, T. R., Chao, K.-J., & Higuchi, N. (2008). The changing Amazon forest. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2007.0033

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.