Claire Asher

The Amazon rainforest generates half its own rainfall, but deforestation threatens to disrupt this cycle, shifting large parts of this ancient forest to dry, savanna habitat. Passing such a “tipping point” would have disastrous knock-on effects for climate and weather patterns regionally and globally.
A recent study modelling the impact of proposed roads, hydropower and mining developments in the Amazon basin suggests that 21-43 percent of the Amazon’s original extent will be lost by 2050, pu...

The Indonesian island of Java has lost more than 90% of its original forest, confining tree-dwelling creatures to fragments of rainforest. That poses a threat to animals such as the critically endangered Javan slow loris (). This primate cannot leap, so it must travel on the ground to reach unconnected trees, exposing it to predators and parasites.

Sugarcane crop production in Brazil may need to expand by up to 5 million hectares by 2030 to meet a rising demand for ethanol biofuels, according to computer models that compared the impact of different economic, social, and policy scenarios on increased ethanol production.

The recent study found that sugarcane ethanol demand by 2030 would increase by between 17.5 and 34.4 million metric tonnes. This demand could be met without new deforestation by intensifying ranching practices and convert...

The capacity of the Amazon rainforest to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is predicted to increase with climate change, but now computer modelling suggests that these increases may be far smaller than expected.

So far, global photosynthesis rates have risen in line with increases in atmospheric CO2 concentrations, but whether this pattern will hold true for the Amazon, one of the oldest ecosystems on Earth, is still unclear.

Depending on how key nutrient cycles are represented, resea...

Across the natural world, the warming climate is leaving ladies without a mate, changing the rules of the playbook, putting partners out of sync and just generally spoiling the mood. Climate change may even be sterilising whole populations.
A shortage of males
Reptiles have a biological quirk that is putting them at risk of losing one sex entirely. This is because they use temperature to determine the sex of their offspring, rather than doing so genetically, like humans and other mammals. For...

Ocelots living the Amazon basin prefer dense forest and avoid roads and human settlements, according to the largest ever camera trap study of this illusive wildcat, published in the journal Ecology and Evolution earlier this year.

The ocelot (Leopardus pardalis) is a medium-sized spotted cat found across the southwestern United States, central and South America.

To safeguard the almost 90 percent of its land still covered with forest, the small Brazilian state of Acre implemented a carbon credit scheme that assigns monetary value to stored carbon in the standing trees and rewards local “ecosystem service providers” for their role protecting it.

Acre’s System of Incentives for Environmental Services (SISA) rewards sustainable harvesting of rubber, nuts and other commodities from the forests. Crucially, it doesn’t make land tenure a prerequisite to qua...

Large-scale satellite data has shown that while large trees expand their crown during the dry season, small trees drop leaves – possibly due to limited light availability in the shaded understory. A new study finds that tree response to dry weather is far more complex, influenced by exposure to the sun and root depth. Detailed measurements of leaf growth and leaf loss during the annual dry season and extreme drought events shows that small trees respond differently to water deprivation depend...

Recent data released by the Brazilian government’s Prodes deforestation satellite monitoring system found that 220,000 square kilometers in the Amazon and Cerrado biomes were deforested between 2006 and 2017.

Roughly 10 percent of that land was then used to grow soy, a native vegetation conversion of at least 21,000 square kilometres (with over 17,000 of that in the Cerrado), according to the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) and Global Canopy’s Trase platform, which analyze commodities s...

In the 1980s, a promising new drug target emerged in the battle against cancer. Known as c-Myc, the protein is encoded by one of the first cellular oncogenes discovered in humans and has since been found to be dysregulated in more than 50 percent of all human cancers. The peptide acts as a transcription factor, promoting the expression of genes involved in the cell cycle, cell death, and tumorigenesis. This made it an obvious target for anticancer drugs. However, despite decades of concerted ...