U.S. Forest Service unveils extensive closures of research facilities | Science | AAAS www.science.org/content/arti...

The US Forest Service. This is madness. Illegal, obviously. But madness even if it weren’t. WTAF morethanjustparks.substack.com/p/breaking-t...

Global Change Biology | Environmental Change Journal | Wiley Online Library onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... 2024 was one of the worst years in history with record-breaking levels of CO2, droughts and high temperatures.

A single tropical tree can create as much cooling as several air conditioners, and across forests can cool a whole region.

The thermophilisation rate of plant communities in response to global warming is 5 times faster on alpine summits than in forests or grasslands across 🇪🇺 This finding corroborates former findings on the greater likelihood for upslope than poleward range shifts of plants 🌳🌲☘️🌾🪻🌼 shorturl.at/gc0TJ

Climate models may be underestimating the impact of deforestation on Amazon rainfall. New research indicates that since 1980, forest clearing has led to an 11% decline in precipitation, potentially allowing critical rainfall thresholds to be crossed much sooner than current climate models predict.👇️

The Amazon rainforest was hit with two severe droughts during 2023–2024. Models suggest that just over half the forest will not recover within seven years, which is the maximum time between droughts in recent decades. In PNAS: https://ow.ly/BKQ150YySOw

‘Continuity over novelty’: why environmental science needs to rethink its focus www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Satellite data and AI analysis indicate that Amazon wildfire carbon emissions in 2024 may be up to three times higher than previous estimates, impacting climate models and carbon budgets. doi.org/hbttb3

New paper in PNAS that came out today: Unprecedented Amazonian rainforests damage during the 2023–2024 droughts. Read our paper for details: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

El Niño is coming, and it is shaping up to be a big one. Over at The Climate Brink I've put together a compilation of the latest forecasts by different modeling groups. They suggest that we might see an event comparable in strength to what we saw in 2016: www.theclimatebrink....

Over four decades, tree richness across the Andes and Amazon has shifted unevenly. Some regions are losing species while others, like the northern Andes, are gaining. Researchers say precipitation and forest fragmentation drive the trend, and limiting deforestation could help protect diversity.

Global Warming Has Accelerated Significantly - Foster - 2026 - Geophysical Research Letters - Wiley Online Library agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

The future of Europe’s forest disturbance regimes– a thread. Tl, dr: Disturbances from wildfire, bark beetles & wind will continue to increase in the coming decades. Under unabated climate change disturbances could more than double by 2100. New paper out in @science.org doi.org/10.1126/scie...

An international team led by researchers at TUM has calculated how disturbances could transform Europe’s forests by 2100: www.tum.de/en/news-and-...

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Liana cutting accelerates tropical forest recovery at a fraction of the cost of tree planting

landcarbonlab.org/insights/agr... "...the world lost as much as 95 million ha of non-forest natural ecosystems, including grasslands, savannas and wetlands, to annual crops between 2005-2020, roughly four times the amount of forest that was lost to annual crops and pasture over the same period..."

Fabaceae emerge as amongst the most embolism-resistant tree families in Amazonia. Forests in the Brazilian and Guiana Shield regions, where Fabaceae abundance is high, are expected to have greater drought resistance than Western Amazon forests.

Large-scale patterns of tropical forest embolism resistance mapped across space and angiosperm phylogeny. Combining measurements across the Amazon with 100s of floristic samples, Julia Tavares & colleagues report remarkable variation in vulnerability to drought. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Intact tropical forests are seeing mysterious bird declines. Is another “silent spring” brewing? Learn more: https://scim.ag/4aCs0Er

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... "...Our results show signals of an early-stage forest functional transformation that could reduce forest productivity and carbon uptake, increase vulnerability to fire, and diminish biodiversity..."

Ecophysiology for climate-smart forest management #TansleyReview by Gessler et al. @wslresearch.bsky.social @arthurobuntspecht.bsky.social @annekempel.bsky.social @josegruenzweig.bsky.social nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... #plantscience

🌳💧The Brazilian Legal Amazon region delivers rainfall generation worth US$20 ± 7 billion annually, with each meter squared of forest contributing 300 L of water per year. @universityofleeds.bsky.social 👉Read more here: www.nature.com/articles/s43...

Why long-term science is needed in a short term world. www.nature.com/articles/s44...

New study shows that historical #deforestation has substantially altered regional #precipitation over the southern #Amazon basin, with #climate models underestimating this effect. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Increasing tree mortality over time in Australian forests www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Climate warming is generally making trees grow faster, but the greater effect is that tree growth is becoming more unpredictable, creating a threat to the stability of forests. New paper by Li & He (2026). 🧪🌏🌐🌲🌳

The Yanomami, an Indigenous group from the Amazon, is confronting surges in #malaria amid increasing illegal gold mining in their territory. Read 'Investigating the Yanomami malaria outbreak: gold mining and malaria': doi.org/10.1098/rsbl... #BiologyLetters

"Our results reveal that mining-induced deforestation is two to three times higher than previous estimates, accounting for 19,765 km2 of deforestation. Notably, over half (50.29%) of this deforestation is linked to unrecorded mining activities" www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🌴🔥 🍁

environment.leeds.ac.uk/faculty/news... Our new paper uses the Power of Plots to reveal how tropical forests are changing: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A new study warns that climate change could wipe out large areas where the Amazon’s biggest trees can survive. If emissions stay high, up to 45% of their habitat could be lost by 2080. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Tree diversity is changing in the Amazon and Andes. Belen Fadrique leads our analysis in @natecoevo.nature.com w/ 400 plots + 40 years of RAINFOR records. www.nature.com/articles/s41... Hot, drier, more fragmented forests are losing species. Many in the Andes + western Amazon are gaining them.

Tropical Montane Cloud Forests Have High Resilience to Five Years of Severe Soil Drought 🔗 buff.ly/rwpl5Xu

Oil helped build Venezuela’s science. Can oil now revive it? | Science | AAAS www.science.org/content/arti...

I’m proud to be a co-author on this study, greatly led by Belen, which uses four decades of plot data across the Andes and Amazon to reveal how tree species richness is shifting in response to global change. Sustaining and expanding long-term collaborations like this is of extreme importance!

Intense droughts have caused water stress and elevated mortality for trees in the Amazon, foreshadowing the future of tropical forests as the climate changes go.nature.com/4qpTWRv

✨ Paper spotlight ✨ (🧵 1/7) Beyond species means – the intraspecific contribution to global wood density variation nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

I’m #hiring - Our company is looking for a Remote Sensing Data Engineer! If you're interested innovative remote sensing analytics and developing systems to scale-up reforestation projects, we’d love to hear from you. Our j.d. and links to apply are here: lnkd.in/gvzb_3ck Reach out to learn more 🧪🌳🌐🍁

The red dot is a baby North Atlantic right whale trying to migrate up the east coast of the United states. The blue streaks are fast moving shipping vessels entering and leaving New York City harbor. One collision and the whale is dead. We need *mandatory* speed limits for these vessels! 🧪🦑🌍

New research from our group: A pervasive increase in tree mortality across the Australian continent - driven by rising temperatures rdcu.be/eXSa7

Ecological insights from three decades of forest biodiversity experiments @natrevbiodiv.nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Land-use change is the main cause of deforestation in the Amazon, but the risk of abrupt forest decline, along with its potentially devastating consequences, increases as the planet warms, with a strong nonlinear trend beyond 2.3° C of warming. In PNAS: https://ow.ly/6Prr50XKAN1

Global Forest Watch has launched a new AI-powered alert system that identifies what’s driving deforestation — from agriculture and mining to wildfires. The data currently cover the Amazon, Congo Basin and Indonesia, with plans to expand to other forests and ecosystems.

Please contribute! We neex broad input, different forest types, and an array of natural disturbances to see how disturbance regimes are changing.

Comment article: Matthew Fagan, Naomi Schwartz and Ruth DeFries offer three considerations on uncertainties and potential misapplications of global datasets to ensure responsible use of remote-sensing datasets in ecology and environmental science. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Amazon forest faces severe decline under the dual pressures of anthropogenic climate change and land-use change | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

Calling on all forest disturbance experts: Please consider contributing to our study on global forest disturbance change, and help resolve the nuances of changing forest disturbance regimes. More details and survey here: www.lss.ls.tum.de/edfm/disturb...