Second, the RAINFOR network was successfully used to detect the impact of major disturbance(the 2005 Amazon drought: see below) and to differen tiate its dynamic and floristic effects from the background state of long-term biomass accumulation.
This biomass decline was in fact dominated by a clearly detectable increase in mortality(Phillips et al. 2009).
Thus, if there was a dominating impact of past disturbance events on Amazon forests these would have been detected, as the network is proven to be large enough to detect much more modest disturbance events.