Brazil Nut Tree (Bertholletia excelsa)

Assembled from 31 blocks · 3 evidence · 27 related

1. Story
2. An emergent canopy tree of the Lecythidaceae, reaching around fifty metres and living for centuries, and the clearest single case of why the Amazon cannot be replaced with a plantation of itself. Its flower has a hooded lip that only a large, strong bee can force open, so pollination depends on populations of long-distance-foraging bees that themselves need continuous forest. Its fruit is a woody capsule the size of a grapefruit and hard enough that essentially one animal opens it: the agouti, a rodent with incisors equal to the task, which buries surplus seeds and fails to recover some of them. Remove the bees and the tree sets no fruit; remove the agoutis and the seeds never leave the parent tree's shadow. This is why almost the entire world supply is still gathered from wild trees in standing forest rather than farmed, and why the species is treated as a demonstration that some economic products of the Amazon are conditional on the forest remaining a forest. Peres and colleagues showed in 2003 that heavily harvested stands were missing their juveniles altogether - producing well today and structurally doomed, on a delay measured in human generations.
3. Knowledge
4. Amazon Basin
5. Brazil Nut Tree (Bertholletia excelsa)
6. Agouti (Dasyprocta spp.)
7. Connections
8. Amazon Basin
9. Agouti (Dasyprocta spp.)
10. Agouti (Dasyprocta spp.)
11. Indigenous Peoples and Demarcated Territories of the Amazon
12. Amazon River
13. Manaus
14. Moisture Recycling
15. Amazon Tall Tower Observatory (ATTO)
16. Brazil Nut Tree (Bertholletia excelsa)
17. Jaguar (Panthera onca)
18. Forest Degradation
19. Arc of Deforestation (Arco do Desmatamento)
20. BR-319 (Manaus-Porto Velho Highway)
21. The 2005 Amazon Drought
22. A drought in the southwestern basin reverses the carbon sink
23. A second severe drought follows within five years
24. Aircraft profiles show the eastern Amazon emitting more carbon than it absorbs
25. The UN climate conference convenes at the mouth of the Amazon
26. Brazil Nut Tree (Bertholletia excelsa)
27. Brazil Nut Tree (Bertholletia excelsa)
28. Evidence
29. Supports the finding that persistently overharvested Brazil nut stands lack juvenile recruitment and are therefore not demographically sustainable despite producing well in the present. V55 verification basis: not retrieved in this session; the number of stands sampled and the countries surveyed are described approximately.
30. Supports the threatened listing of the Brazil nut tree. V55 verification basis: the Red List was not retrievable in this session; the category commonly given is Vulnerable but neither the category nor the assessment year is asserted in the object record, and a curator must confirm both.
31. Supports the finding that domesticated tree species are disproportionately abundant in the modern Amazon and that their abundance and richness increase near archaeological sites, indicating a persistent pre-Columbian human signature in present forest composition. V55 verification basis: not retrieved in this session; the magnitude of the enrichment is deliberately not quoted.