The Brazilian Amazon has been a focus of land development with large swaths of forests converted to agriculture. Forest degradation by selective logging and fires has accompanied the advance of the frontier and has resulted in significant impacts on Amazonian ecosystems. Changes in forest structure resulting from forest disturbances have large impacts on the surface energy balance, including on land surface temperature (LST) and evapotranspiration (ET). The objective of this study is to assess the effects of forest disturbances on water fluxes and canopy structural properties in a transitional forest site located in Mato Grosso State, Southern Amazon. We used ET and LST products from MODIS and Landsat 8 as well as GEDI-derived forest structure data to address our research questions. We found that disturbances induced seasonal water stress, more pronounced and earlier in croplands and pastures than in forests, and more pronounced in second-growth and recently burned areas than in logged and intact forests. Moreover, we found that ET and LST were negatively related, with a more consistent relationship across disturbance classes in the dry season than the wet season, and that forest and cropland and pasture classes showed contrasting relationships in the dry season. Finally, we found that canopy structural properties exhibited moderate relationships with ET and LST in the most disturbed forests, but negligible correlations in the least disturbed forests. Our findings help to elucidate degraded forests functioning under a changing climate and to improve estimates of water and energy fluxes in the Amazon degraded forests.

Selective logging, fragmentation, and understory fires directly degrade forest structure and composition. However, studies addressing the effects of forest degradation on carbon, water, and energy cycles are scarce. Here, we integrate field observations and high-resolution remote sensing from airborne lidar to provide realistic initial conditions to the Ecosystem Demography Model (ED–2.2) and investigate how disturbances from forest degradation affect gross primary production (GPP), evapotranspiration (ET), and sensible heat flux (H). We used forest structural information retrieved from airborne lidar samples (13,500 ha) and calibrated with 817 inventory plots (0.25 ha) across precipitation and degradation gradients in the Eastern Amazon as initial conditions to ED-2.2 model. Our results show that the magnitude and seasonality of fluxes were modulated by changes in forest structure caused by degradation. During the dry season and under typical conditions, severely degraded forests (biomass loss ≥ 66%) experienced water-stress with declines in ET (up to 34%) and GPP (up to 35%), and increases of H (up to 43%) and daily mean ground temperatures (up to 6.5°C) relative to intact forests. In contrast, the relative impact of forest degradation on energy, water, and carbon cycles markedly diminishes under extreme, multi-year droughts, as a consequence of severe stress experienced by intact forests. Our results highlight that the water and energy cycles in the Amazon are not only driven by climate and deforestation, but also the past disturbance and changes of forest structure from degradation, suggesting a much broader influence of human land use activities on the tropical ecosystems.