In recent years, the escalating impact of global warming has prompted efforts to reverse troubling trends, often by planting trees to capture and remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it ...

If you liked this story, share it with other people. The notion that grassy biomes arise from degraded forests and therefore harbor low levels of biodiversity is not only inaccurate, it also helps ...

Researchers focused on the stability of tropical rainforests in the Americas, Africa, Asia and Oceania. With their approach they were able to explore how rainforests respond to changing rainfall. A ...

2019 marks the 250th anniversary of Alexander von Humboldt. He was one of the first naturalists to document the distribution and adaptation of species on tropical mountains in the 19th century.

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 ...

Wildfire threatens the survival of endangered purple-crowned fairy-wrens living along the rivers and creeks of northern Australia, our new research has found. For almost two decades, we studied the ...

Researchers at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama have published dramatic maps showing the locations of lightning strikes across the tropics in Global Change Biology. Based ...

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American To feed the increasing number of Africans who ...