Land-use change occurs nowhere more rapidly than in the tropics, where the imbalance between deforestation and forest regrowth has large consequences for the global carbon cycle. However, considerable uncertainty remains about the rate of biomass recovery in secondary forests, and how these rates are influenced by climate, landscape, and prior land use. Here we analyse aboveground biomass recovery during secondary succession in 45 forest sites and about 1,500 forest plots covering the major environmental gradients in the Neotropics. The studied secondary forests are highly productive and resilient. Aboveground biomass recovery after 20 years was on average 122 megagrams per hectare (Mg ha(-1)), corresponding to a net carbon uptake of 3.05 Mg C ha(-1) yr(-1), 11 times the uptake rate of old-growth forests. Aboveground biomass stocks took a median time of 66 years to recover to 90% of old-growth values. Aboveground biomass recovery after 20 years varied 11.3-fold (from 20 to 225 Mg ha(-1)) across sites, and this recovery increased with water availability (higher local rainfall and lower climatic water deficit). We present a biomass recovery map of Latin America, which illustrates geographical and climatic variation in carbon sequestration potential during forest regrowth. The map will support policies to minimize forest loss in areas where biomass resilience is naturally low (such as seasonally dry forest regions) and promote forest regeneration and restoration in humid tropical lowland areas with high biomass resilience.

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Models reveal the high carbon mitigation potential of tropical forest regeneration.

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Abstract:The Storm Water Management Model (SWMM) is a dynamic simulation engine of flow in sewer systems developed by the USEPA. It has been successfully used for analyzing and designing both storm water and waste water systems. However, despite including some interfacing functions, these functions are insufficient for certain simulations. This paper describes some new functions that have been added to the existing ones to form a library of functions (Toolkit). The Toolkit presented here will allow the direct modification of network data during simulation without the need to access the input file. To support the use of this library, a testing protocol was performed in order to evaluate both calculation time and accuracy of results. Finally, a case study is presented. In this application, this library will be used for the design of a sewerage network by using a genetic algorithm based on successive iterations.

The sewer network design problem consists of determining both the layout and the hydraulic design of the system. This paper aims to find an optimal hydraulic design for a specific layout consisting of a series of pipes. An optimal hydraulic design of a series of pipes is that which satisfies all the hydraulic, commercial, and construction constraints, while minimizing the construction costs. The present paper proposes a graph modeling framework in which the result of a shortest path problem coincides with the hydraulic design, and the underlying graph models the diameter and slope of each pipe in the series. To assess the performance of the methodology, several numerical examples are presented varying the pipe material, the topography, and the number of pipes in the series.

This paper proposes an iterative mathematical optimization framework to solve the layout and hydraulic design problems of sewer networks. The layout selection model determines the flow rate and direction per pipe using mixed-integer programming, which results in a tree-like structured network. This network layout parametrizes a second model that determines hydraulic features including the diameter and the upstream and downstream invert elevations of pipes using a shortest path algorithm. These models are embedded in an iterative scheme that refines a cost function approximation for the first model upon learning the actual design cost from the second model. The framework was successfully tested on two sewer network benchmarks from the literature and a real sewer network located in Bogotá, Colombia, that is proposed as a new instance. For both benchmarks, the proposed methodology found a better solution with up to 42% cost reduction compared to the best methodologies reported in the literature. These are near-optimal solutions with respect to construction cost that satisfy all hydraulic and pipe connectivity constraints of a sewer system.