Claire Asher

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 ...

A still controversial 2012 update to the Brazilian Forest Code that reduced the area required for legal reserves on rural private properties is endangering more than 15 million hectares (57,915 square miles) of Amazon forest, an area roughly the size of the U.S. state of Georgia, according to a recent study.

Under the 2012 New Forest Code changes, Amazon states that have protected at least 65 percent of their territory as conservation units or indigenous reserves can reduce the percentage of ...

Female bats help their offspring find a cosy place to rest — but when the youngsters want a meal, they’re on their own.
Bats’ small size and nocturnal habits mean relatively little is known about their parenting. To learn more, Simon Ripperger at the Museum of Natural History in Berlin and his colleagues attached miniature tracking sensors to 60 common noctule bats (Nyctalus noctula) belonging to a colony in one of the city’s forests.
The scientists found that when young bats moved to a new r...

City gardens are becoming increasingly important habitats for bees and other insect pollinators, which face a range of threats in farmland.

Katherine Baldock at the University of Bristol, UK, and her colleagues recorded the number of species of flowering plant and pollinating insect at 360 sites across four British cities — Bristol, Reading, Leeds and Edinburgh. Residential gardens, particularly in wealthy neighbourhoods, had the greatest abundance of flowering plants and harboured up to 50 t...

Vast tracts of Cambodia’s tropical forests are disappearing to feed the world’s voracious appetite for natural rubber, which is made from tree sap.

Starting in the mid-2000s, global demand for natural rubber surged, driven largely by the growth of China’s tyre and automobile industries. Kenneth Grogan at the University of Copenhagen and his colleagues used satellite imagery to estimate the total area of Cambodian forest cleared to make way for crops such as rubber and palm oil.

The costs of acting now to adapt to a predicted, dramatic loss of Amazon rainforest would be at least one order of magnitude lower than the economic fallout if we waited and did nothing, a new study says.

It’s the first comprehensive impact analysis of a contentious prediction: that there exists a definitive climate-driven deforestation tipping point beyond which large swaths of the Amazon rainforest would be rapidly replaced with savanna.

Frequent droughts are changing the assortment of trees in Amazon basin ecosystems, with water-loving varieties slowly being replaced by more drought-resistant species. However, the forests are not adapting fast enough, and are failing to keep pace with the rate with which the basin’s climate is changing, according to a new study published in the journal Global Change Biology.

Frogs that raise their young in tiny pools of water that collect on plant leaves must make a delicate trade-off between the risk of drying out and the risk of being eaten, according to a study publishing December 5 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Mirco Solé from the Universidade Estadual de Santa Cruz in Bahia, Brazil and colleagues.

The temporary pools of water trapped by the leaf rosette of some plants in the Bromeliaceae family are used by a variety of creatures as a source of prey,...

Scientists and the media have documented deepening drought in the Amazon basin. But a new study finds that flood events are significantly intensifying too, becoming five times more common over the last century.
The effect is caused by a combination of factors, including an increase in strength of the Walker circulation – an ocean-driven pattern of air circulation that carries warm moist air from the tropical Atlantic across South America towards the Pacific, resulting in Amazon precipitation....

Large hydroelectric dams are not worth the environmental and societal costs, and their benefits will continue to dwindle further as the climate changes, analysts argue. Dams have been linked to habitat degradation, harm to biodiversity and migrating aquatic species, and to negative changes in river ecology. More problems: dams rarely live up to promoter pledges. Costs are often underestimated, and once built, big dams rarely generate the huge energy amounts promised.