Africa’s forests, constituting 14% of global cover, face accelerating decline due to human-driven economic activities, impacting climate and biodiversity. A study provides high-resolution mapping of post-deforestation land use, aiding conservation efforts and supporting the EU’s Deforestation Regulation, crucial for sustainable resource management.
A major international collaboration of 356 scientists has found almost identical patterns of tree diversity across the world’s tropical forests.
Scientists are utilizing environmental DNA (eDNA) shed by living organisms to study biodiversity. EU-funded LeDNA project collects eDNA from lakes to assess and discover species, aiding global biodiversity preservation efforts. On World Biodiversity Day, May 22, 2024, a citizen science survey will test the method’s scalability, involving people worldwide in lake eDNA sampling using a specially designed device. Similarly, the BIOSPACE project explores eDNA in forests, predicting microbial biodiversity with satellite imagery, offering systematic and unbiased insights into lesser-known species for comprehensive biodiversity conservation.
Nature-based climate solutions, such as planting trees, won’t be anywhere near as big a part of the world’s solution to climate change as governments currently plan for, and relying on them is ‘risky’ according to a report.
New research has made significant strides in understanding how coniferous forest ecosystems may respond to climatic changes. The study investigates the relationship between tree-ring indices (TRI) and the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) in the context of climate, topography, and soil conditions.
Plants emit odours for a variety of reasons, such as to communicate with each other, to deter herbivores or to respond to changing environmental conditions. An interdisciplinary team of researchers carried out a study to investigate how biodiversity influences the emission of these substances. For the first time, they were able to show that species-rich forests emit less of these gases into the atmosphere than monocultures.
New research reveals that deforestation in the Amazon not only warms immediate surroundings but also impacts areas up to 100 kilometers away. Analyzing data from 2001 to 2020, the study links regional forest loss to a significant temperature rise—4.4 °C in areas with both local and regional deforestation. The findings emphasize the critical importance of understanding how Amazon deforestation contributes to climate change and highlight the potential benefits of reducing deforestation for local, regional, and national scales.
Urban environments have become hotspots for understanding how rapid evolution occurs in response to extreme environmental changes. These habitats exert selective pressures on resident organisms that impact their evolutionary trajectories. Recently, researchers from Japan investigated how the creeping woodsorrel plant might adapt in response to elevated temperatures that result from urbanization. Understanding these effects can help predict evolutionary traits to manage plant evolution in the face of shifting climatic conditions.
For several years, ecological research has argued that climate often has no determining influence on the distribution of forests and savannas in tropical regions. However, an international research team has now succeeded in proving that it depends mostly on climatic factors whether regions in Africa are covered by forest or savanna. The study, confirms the dominant role of climate in the formation of global vegetation patterns.
Some southern beeches in the Andes have plumbed deeper for moisture as the surface has dried up. But doing so may deplete resources and undermine the trees’ future health.
