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Global forests show extensive tree-cover loss. Here, the authors report that plant attributes and functions can increase under limited tree-cover loss, but also that this safety margin due to edge effects from fragmentation has already been exceeded in 35.7% of forests globally.

Scientists must call out — not merely greenwash — infrastructure building that will ruin environments, lives and economies, urges William Laurance.

The Amazon faces worsening droughts, yet little is known about large-scale variation in the physiological limits of Amazon trees. Here, the authors reveal family-level conservatism in embolism resistance and estimate that Brazilian and Guiana shield forests are more resistant than Western Amazonia forests.

Things are heating up in the Amazon as the burning season begins. In Brazil, a 30-year-old study of forest fragments is itself threatened by farming, logging and hunting, say William Laurance and Regina Luizão.

Wood density is a key control on tree biomass, and understanding its spatial variation improves estimates of forest carbon stock. Sullivan et al. measure >900 forest plots to quantify wood density and produce high resolution maps of its variation across South American tropical forests.

Analysing >1,700 inventory plots from the Amazon Tree Diversity Network, the authors show that the majority of Amazon tree species can occupy floodplains and that patterns of species turnover are closely linked to regional flood patterns.

Inventory data from more than 1 million trees across African, Amazonian and Southeast Asian tropical forests suggests that, despite their high diversity, just 1,053 species, representing a consistent ~2.2% of tropical tree species in each region, constitute half of Earth’s 800 billion tropical trees.

A global research network monitoring the Amazon for 30 years reports in this study that tree size increased by 3% each decade.

An effort to map roads in the Asia-Pacific region finds that there are 3.0–6.6 times more roads than other sources suggest, and that unmapped ‘ghost roads’ are a major contributor to tropical forest loss.

Roads are proliferating across the planet. Located and designed wisely, they can help rather than harm the environment, argue William F. Laurance and Andrew Balmford.

Forest responses can have major effects on tree architecture and community structure near the edges of forest fragments. Here, using terrestrial LiDAR scanning data from long-term forest plots, the authors find a net negative effect of fragmentation on Amazonian Forest aboveground biomass.

Most Amazon tree species are rare but a small proportion are common across the region. The authors show that different species are hyperdominant in different size classes and that hyperdominance is more phylogenetically restricted for larger canopy trees than for smaller understory ones.

Analysis of changes in functional groups of species and potential drivers of environmental change for protected areas across the world’s major tropical regions reveals large variation between reserves that have been effective and those experiencing an erosion of biodiversity, and shows that environmental changes immediately outside reserves are nearly as important as those inside in determining their ecological fate.

Tree mortality has been shown to be the dominant control on carbon storage in Amazon forests, but little is known of how and why Amazon forest trees die. Here the authors analyse a large Amazon-wide dataset, finding that fast-growing species face greater mortality risk, but that slower-growing individuals within a species are more likely to die, regardless of size.

Tiger numbers in India are starting to rebound after decades of being perilously low. This recovery offers lessons for conserving other rare animals.

Inventory data from 90 lowland Amazonian forest plots and a phylogeny of 526 angiosperm genera were used to show that taxonomic and phylogenetic diversity are both predictive of wood productivity but not of biomass variation.

Data from a variety of sources—including satellite, climate and soil data, as well as field-collected information on plant traits—are pooled and analysed to map the functional diversity of tropical forest canopies globally.

The Amazon rainforest is dominated by relatively few tree species, yet the degree to which this hyperdominance influences carbon cycling remains unknown. Here, the authors analyse 530 forest plots and show that ∼1% of species are responsible for 50% of the aboveground carbon storage and productivity.

Two double-sun exoplanets have been discovered by the Kepler spacecraft, establishing a new class of ‘circumbinary’ exoplanets and suggesting that at least several million such systems exist in our Galaxy.

Using 13 functional traits we characterize the Amazonian trees and the communities they form. Amazonian tree communities are distributed along a fast-slow-spectrum. This results in clear differences in traits among these forests, as well as their biomass and biomass productivity.

A global zoning scheme is proposed to limit the environmental costs of road building while maximizing its benefits for human development, by discriminating among areas where road building would have high environmental costs but relatively low agricultural advantage, areas where strategic road improvements could promote agricultural production with relatively modest environmental costs, and ‘conflict areas’ where road building may have large agricultural benefits but also high environmental costs.

Tree species turnover across Amazonian forests unveils sharp floristic transitional zones, that are linked with changes in soil fertility and climate.

A study mapping the tree species richness in Amazonian forests shows that soil type exerts a strong effect on species richness, probably caused by the areas of these forest types. Cumulative water deficit, tree density and temperature seasonality affect species richness at a regional scale.

One strategy for reducing catastrophic floods invokes protecting or regenerating forests that lie upstream of a threatened region. Support for this approach comes from a global-scale analysis of flood risk.

As peace consolidates in Colombia, can biodiversity survive development? We discuss challenges and opportunities for integrating forest biodiversity conservation into developing, war-dilapidated economies of post-conflict regions, paving the way for a green economy and climate resilient society.

Biodiversity advocate and Amazon expert

Habitat loss and urbanization are primary components of human impact on the environment. Here, Venter et al.use global data on infrastructure, agriculture, and urbanization to show that the human footprint is growing slower than the human population, but footprints are increasing in biodiverse regions.