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The Amazon has existed as a dense and humid rainforest full of life for at least 55 million years. But ∈a new paper, scientists claim that over 75% of the ecosystem has been losing resilience since the early 2000s due to climate change. This process appears to be most prominent ∈ areas that are closer to human activity, as well as ∈ those receiving less rainfall.
The resilience of an ecosystem — its capacity to maintain usual processes like the regrowth of vegetation following drought — is a notoriously difficult concept for scientists to measure. In this paper, the authors analysed satellite images of remote areas of rainforest across the Amazon from 1991 to 2016. Using a measurement called vegetation optical depth, they suggested that forest biomass (the total weight of organisms ∈a given area) is taking longer to recover ∈ these
places as stresses accumulate.
This, the authors argue, suggests that longer dry seasons and drier conditions caused by climate change are undermining the rainforest’s ability to recover from successive droughts. The authors note, for example, that drought-sensitive tree species are being replaced with drought-resistant ones at a much slower rate compared with rapid changes ∈ the regional climate. This could mean that the Amazon is approaching a tipping point which, if passed, would lead to the collapse of the rainforest into a dry grassland or savanna.
(https://theconversation.com, 07.03.2022. Adaptado.)
In the excerpt from the first paragraph “since the early 2000s due to climate change”, the underlined expression can be replaced, with no change ∈ meaning, by
