The hydrology of Amazon river-floodplains is increasingly being impacted by extreme climatic events and land use changes in the uplands. We have assembled an interdisciplinary team of qualified scientists from Virginia Tech, the Woods Hole Research Center, and University of California Santa Barbara to explore the feedbacks of such extreme events on seasonal inundation and, ultimately, on the future productivity of floodplain ecosystems. Funding for this research was recently provided by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).