text: Amazon rainforest is losing resilience: New e | EurekAlert!
  "Reduced resilience – the ability to recover from perturbations like droughts or fires – can mean an increased risk of dieback of the Amazon rainforest. That we see such a resilience loss in observations is worrying," says Niklas Boers from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and the Technical University of Munich, who conducted the study jointly with researchers from the University of Exeter, UK.
  The Amazon is considered a potential tipping element in the Earth system and a number of studies revealed its vulnerability. "However, computer simulation studies of its future yield quite a range of results," says Boers. "We've therefore been looking into specific observational data for signs of resilience changes during the last decades. We see continuously decreasing rainforest resilience since the early 2000s, but we cannot tell when a potential transition from rainforest to savanna might happen. When it will be observable, it would likely be too late to stop it." The research is part of the project 'Tipping Points in the Earth System' (TiPES) funded by European Union's Horizon 2020 programme.