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Properties and Management of Soils in the Tropics Open
The long-awaited second edition of this classic textbook expands on the first edition to include advances made in the last four decades, bringing the topic completely up to date. The book addresses critical issues such as whether humanity …
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Humboldt’s enigma: What causes global patterns of mountain biodiversity? Open
Mountains contribute disproportionately to the terrestrial biodiversity of Earth, especially in the tropics, where they host hotspots of extraordinary and puzzling richness. With about 25% of all land area, mountain regions are home to mor…
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Pantropical climate interactions Open
Tropical interconnections The El Niño–Southern Oscillation, which originates in the tropical Pacific, affects the rest of the world's tropics by perturbing global atmospheric circulation. Less appreciated than this influence is how the tro…
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The Impacts of Oil Palm on Recent Deforestation and Biodiversity Loss Open
Palm oil is the most widely traded vegetable oil globally, with demand projected to increase substantially in the future. Almost all oil palm grows in areas that were once tropical moist forests, some of them quite recently. The conversion…
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Climate-driven declines in arthropod abundance restructure a rainforest food web Open
Significance Arthropods, invertebrates including insects that have external skeletons, are declining at an alarming rate. While the tropics harbor the majority of arthropod species, little is known about trends in their abundance. We compa…
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Plant diversity patterns in neotropical dry forests and their conservation implications Open
Seasonally dry tropical forests are distributed across Latin America and the Caribbean and are highly threatened, with less than 10% of their original extent remaining in many countries. Using 835 inventories covering 4660 species of woody…
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Biochar boosts tropical but not temperate crop yields Open
Applying biochar to soil is thought to have multiple benefits, from helping mitigate climate change [1, 2], to managing waste [3] to conserving soil [4]. Biochar is also widely assumed to boost crop yield [5, 6], but there is controversy r…
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Carbon sequestration potential of second-growth forest regeneration in the Latin American tropics Open
Models reveal the high carbon mitigation potential of tropical forest regeneration.
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Global meta-analysis shows pervasive phosphorus limitation of aboveground plant production in natural terrestrial ecosystems Open
Phosphorus (P) limitation of aboveground plant production is usually assumed to occur in tropical regions but rarely elsewhere. Here we report that such P limitation is more widespread and much stronger than previously estimated. In our gl…
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Terrestrial carbon inputs to inland waters: A current synthesis of estimates and uncertainty Open
Globally, inland waters receive a significant but ill‐defined quantity of terrestrial carbon (C). When summed, the contemporary estimates for the three possible fates of C in inland waters (storage, outgassing, and export) highlight that t…
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Savanna woody encroachment is widespread across three continents Open
Tropical savannas are a globally extensive biome prone to rapid vegetation change in response to changing environmental conditions. Via a meta‐analysis, we quantified savanna woody vegetation change spanning the last century. We found a gl…
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Distribution and drivers of global mangrove forest change, 1996–2010 Open
For the period 1996-2010, we provide the first indication of the drivers behind mangrove land cover and land use change across the (pan-)tropics using time-series Japanese Earth Resources Satellite (JERS-1) Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) a…
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The impact of hunting on tropical mammal and bird populations Open
Quantifying hunting-induced defaunation As the human population grows and increasingly encroaches on remaining wildlife habitat, hunting threatens many species. Benítez-López et al. conducted a large-scale meta-analysis of hunting trends a…
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Global increase in major tropical cyclone exceedance probability over the past four decades Open
Significance Tropical cyclones (TCs), and particularly major TCs, pose substantial risk to many regions around the globe. Identifying changes in this risk and determining causal factors for the changes is a critical element for taking step…
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Rising atmospheric methane: 2007–2014 growth and isotopic shift Open
From 2007 to 2013, the globally averaged mole fraction of methane in the atmosphere increased by 5.7 ± 1.2 ppb yr −1 . Simultaneously, δ 13 C CH4 (a measure of the 13 C/ 12 C isotope ratio in methane) has shifted to significantly more nega…
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Amazonia is the primary source of Neotropical biodiversity Open
Significance Amazonia is not only the world’s most diverse rainforest but is also the region in tropical America that has contributed most to its total biodiversity. We show this by estimating and comparing the evolutionary history of a la…
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Long-term (1990–2019) monitoring of forest cover changes in the humid tropics Open
Three decades of satellite observations provide unprecedented information about forest change trajectories in the humid tropics.
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Understanding the drivers of<span>S</span>outheast<span>A</span>sian biodiversity loss Open
Southeast Asia (SE Asia) is a known global hotspot of biodiversity and endemism, yet the region is also one of the most biotically threatened. Ecosystems across the region are threatened by an array of drivers, each of which increases the …
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Climate change causes upslope shifts and mountaintop extirpations in a tropical bird community Open
Significance Global warming is predicted to constitute an “escalator to extinction” for species that live on mountains. This is because species are generally moving to higher elevations as temperatures warm, and species that live only near…
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Rapid conversions and avoided deforestation: examining four decades of industrial plantation expansion in Borneo Open
New plantations can either cause deforestation by replacing natural forests or avoid this by using previously cleared areas. The extent of these two situations is contested in tropical biodiversity hotspots where objective data are limited…
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Compositional response of Amazon forests to climate change Open
Most of the planet's diversity is concentrated in the tropics, which includes many regions undergoing rapid climate change. Yet, while climate‐induced biodiversity changes are widely documented elsewhere, few studies have addressed this is…
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Global restoration opportunities in tropical rainforest landscapes Open
Assessment of socioenvironmental benefits and feasibility identifies priority areas for restoring global tropical rainforests.
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What are the limits to oil palm expansion? Open
Palm oil production has boomed over the last decade, resulting in an expansion of the global oil palm planting area from 10 to 17 Million hectares between 2000 and 2012. Previous studies showed that a significant share of this expansion ha…
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What causes deforestation in Indonesia? Open
We investigate the causes of deforestation in Indonesia, a country with one of the highest rates of primary natural forest loss in the tropics, annually between 2001 and 2016. We use high spatial resolution imagery made available on Google…
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Global distribution of earthworm diversity Open
Earthworm distribution in global soils Earthworms are key components of soil ecological communities, performing vital functions in decomposition and nutrient cycling through ecosystems. Using data from more than 7000 sites, Phillips et al.…
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Disentangling the numbers behind agriculture-driven tropical deforestation Open
Tropical deforestation continues at alarming rates with profound impacts on ecosystems, climate, and livelihoods, prompting renewed commitments to halt its continuation. Although it is well established that agriculture is a dominant driver…
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<span>biomass</span>: an <span>r</span> package for estimating above‐ground biomass and its uncertainty in tropical forests Open
Summary Estimating forest above‐ground biomass ( AGB ), or carbon ( AGC ), in tropical forests has become a major concern for scientists and stakeholders. However, AGB assessment procedures are not fully standardized and even more importan…
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Global biodiversity loss from tropical deforestation Open
Tropical forests are incredibly biodiverse; they support at least two-thirds of the world’s biodiversity (1) despite covering less than 10% of Earth’s land surface (2). Unfortunately, prospects for tropical forests and the biodiversity the…
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An expert system model for mapping tropical wetlands and peatlands reveals South America as the largest contributor Open
Wetlands are important providers of ecosystem services and key regulators of climate change. They positively contribute to global warming through their greenhouse gas emissions, and negatively through the accumulation of organic material i…
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Multidimensional tropical forest recovery Open
Resilient secondary tropical forests? Although deforestation is rampant across the tropics, forest has a strong capacity to regrow on abandoned lands. These “secondary” forests may increasingly play important roles in biodiversity conserva…