Felipe Souza, Price Mathai and their co-authors published a new study analyzing the diverse bacterial population in the Amazonian atmosphere. The composition varied mainly with seasonal changes in temperature, relative humidity, and precipitation. On the other hand, they did not detect significant differences between the ground and canopy levels. They also identified bacterial species that participate in the nitrogen cycle.
Ramsay et al. measured inorganic trace gases such as ammonia and nitric acid and aerosols in the dry season at ATTO. They are to serve as baseline values for their concentration and fluxes in the atmosphere and are a first step in deciphering exchange processes of inorganic trace gases between the Amazon rainforest and the atmosphere.
Soot and other aerosols from biomass burning can influence regional and global weather and climate. Lixia Liu and her colleagues studied how this affects the Amazon Basin during the dry season. While there are many different interactions between biomass burning aerosols and climate, they found that they overall lead to fewer and weaker rain events in the Amazon rainforest.
A new study by Löbs et al. in Biogeosciences documents the microclimatic conditions for tropical mosses as a baseline for studies on their overall relevance on biogeochemical cycling. They found that water and light are overall the most important requirements for them to become photosynthetically active. However, their habitat determines which of the two plays the bigger role.
Nora Zannoni and her colleagues measured BVOC emissions at the ATTO tall tower in several heights. Specifically, they looked at one particular BVOC called α-pinene. They found that chiral BOVs at ATTO are neither equally abundant nor is the ratio of the two forms constant over time, season, or height. Surprisingly, they also discovered that termites might be a previously unknown source for BVOCs.
