Current tropical timber practices are not sustainable and nations should consider the implications of ‘peak timber’, a study has suggested. A team of researchers says the standard cutting cycle of 30-40 years is too short to allow trees to grow to a volume required by commercial loggers. As a result, the pressure to harvest primary…
The Amazon rainforest is in flux, thanks to agricultural expansion and climate change. In other words, humans have “become important agents of disturbance in the Amazon Basin,” as an international consortium of scientists wrote in a review of the state of the science on the world’s largest rainforest published in the journal Nature. The dry…
As climate change progresses, the planet may lose more plant and animal species than predicted, a new modeling study suggests. This is because current predictions overlook two important factors: the differences in how quickly species relocate and competition among species, according to the researchers, led by Mark Urban, an ecologist at the University of Connecticut….
The most extraordinary aspect of biodiversity is the way in which every living thing on earth, everything that has ever lived on earth, is directly connected through time by an utterly unbroken sequence of reproductive events. It is possible to trace one’s ancestry back through one’s parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and so on, generation after generation…
Biological diversity—something that’s now imperiled by human appetites—may be a sustaining, stabilizing force on planetary scales, and its disruption self-perpetuating. “Earlier interpretations have looked at the Permian-Triassic extinction as purely the result of external physical processes,” said paleobiologist Jessica Whiteside of Brown University. “But low diversity itself can be a feedback.”