Rainforests Can Bounce Back Much Faster Than Thought, Researchers Say

Rainforests Can Bounce Back Much Faster Than Thought, Researchers Say www.nytimes.com/2026/04/21/c...

Map of Canada showing 15 ecozones with a heatmap indicating site density, highlighting high concentrations in Atlantic Maritime and Mixedwood Plain regions.

⭐EDITOR'S CHOICE⭐

The Multi-Agency Ground Plot database: a repository for pan-Canadian forest ground plot data [Data Paper] 🍁🌎

✒️Araya et al.🔗 https://ow.ly/M0eC50YJYxV

📷Araya et al. Fig. 2
#OpenAccess #ForestEcology #Data #🌱

Venezuela’s new mining law could spell disaster for the Amazon, critics warn Venezuela is close to passing a law to update the country’s mining regulations and attract private investment in gold, silver, coltan and other minerals. But advocacy groups say the law may end up…

A new Venezuelan mining law is under fire for lacking rigorous protections. Critics argue the policy will accelerate the destruction of the Amazon despite its "ecological" branding.

Experts argue that as the government seeks capital, the threat to biodiversity and human rights continues to grow.

Intact #tropical #forests 🌴🌴 can buffer hot and dry extremes 🌞 by >6°C. When do recovering #secondary forests recover this capability?
New paper Felicity Newell et al. in Agricult Forest Meteorol
#forestecol #restoration #climate @jocotoco.bsky.social
www.reassembly.de/news/how-muc...

A double-edged sword? Liana wood decomposes faster than tree wood Abstract. Lianas are increasing in many forests and show higher stem turnover rates and different chemical profiles compared with trees. However, liana dea

royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

U.S. Forest Service unveils extensive closures of research facilities Cost-cutting move is expected to cause resignations and turmoil

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

BREAKING: Trump Administration Orders Dismantling of the U.S. Forest Service The headquarters is going to Utah. Every regional office is being shuttered. The research program is being destroyed.

The US Forest Service. This is madness. Illegal, obviously. But madness even if it weren’t. WTAF

morethanjustparks.substack.com/p/breaking-t...

Respiration‐Induced Weakening of Land Sink Contributed to the Largest CO2 Increase in 2024 In 2024, the global CO2 growth rate (CGR) reached an unprecedented 3.73 ± 0.09 ppm year-1, marking a record high since observations began in 1959. However, the underlying causes of this unprecedented...

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.

Chopping down areas of tropical rainforest is causing rising temperatures linked to thousands of deaths A single tropical tree can create as much cooling as several air conditioners, and across forests can cool a whole region.

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

Contrasting thermophilization among forests, grasslands and alpine summits - Nature Analyses of large-scale, multitaxa and long-term thermophilization patterns in forests, grasslands and alpine summits across Europe provide insight into shifts in community composition among different...

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

Study finds deforestation accounts for major Amazon rainfall decline Forest loss, along with climate change, is changing the resilience of the Amazon Rainforest. By disrupting the movement of moisture through the atmosphere, deforestation is reducing rainfall and…

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.👇️

Projection of post-drought recovery of intact Amazonian rainforests after the 2023–2024 droughts. (A) Time series of annual median recovery projections after the 2023–2024 droughts. The error bars represent the medians of the lower and upper bounds of the 95% confidence intervals across all pixels. (B) Spatial pattern of recovery at 7th year after the 2023–2024 droughts.

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 With government funding in decline, researchers should prioritize data collation and training the next generation of scientists.

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

Amazon wildfire emissions may be up to three times higher than estimated Fires are a recurring phenomenon in central South America, often intensified by drought and deforestation. In 2024, wildfire activity reached its highest levels in 20 years, affecting vast areas of the Amazon rainforest and the Cerrado—the world's most biodiverse tropical savanna, stretching across one-fifth of Brazil and extending into Bolivia and Paraguay.

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....

Climate change drives uneven shifts in tree diversity across Amazon and Andes The tropical forests of the Amazon and Andes are some of the most biodiverse places on the planet, but across both regions, changes in climate and landscape conditions are driving a shift in the…

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 During the last decade, the rate at which Earth warmed increased substantially After removing the influence of known natural variability factors, the increase of the warming rate is statistically...

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...

How fires, storms, and bark beetles will shape the future of Europe’s forests TUM researchers have modeled how bark beetles, storms and wildfires could affect Europe’s forests. A doubling of forest damage is possible.

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

Agriculture Is Taking Over Grasslands, Wetlands and Other Overlooked Ecosystems This research provides the first global look at which commodities are associated with ecosystem conversion outside of forests and where the impacts may be greatest.

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...

Graphic with two parts, a map and a chart. Top section: A map showing intact tropical forests in northern South America, most of them in the Amazon River basin. Three locations are called out: 1 is in Panama; 2 is on the eastern border of Ecuador, near the borders with Colombia and Peru; and 3 is in Brazil, on the Amazon River. Undisturbed tropical forest areas are defined as areas where no disturbances were detected in a comparison of satellite imagery from 1990 to 2024. Bottom section: Dot plot with confidence intervals. For each of the three map locations, the chart shows the average annual change in mist net captures for insectivores and for the total bird community. For all three locations, the average annual change for insectivores is in the negative and is lower than for the total bird community.

Intact tropical forests are seeing mysterious bird declines. Is another “silent spring” brewing?

Learn more: https://scim.ag/4aCs0Er

Detected Shifts Towards Drought‐Adaptive Strategies in the Amazon Forest Over the Last Four Decades Amazon forests are facing hotter, drier conditions, and we used 40 years of satellite data to look for early signs of ecological change. Combining satellite observations with leaf measurements from m...

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..."

Conceptual model of the expected role of dryland mechanisms along a climatic gradient from cool and moist towards hot and dry conditions, and their relevance for climate-smart forestry.

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

This is the type of piece that should be open access...come on!

Scientists can’t agree on where the world’s forests are A deceptively simple question underlies many global environmental policies: where, exactly, are the world’s forests? A new study suggests the answer depends heavily on which map one consults—and that ...

news.mongabay.com/2026/02/scie...

🌳💧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...