Nature Ecology & Evolution - Spaceborne and airborne scanning technologies are revolutionizing the study of tropical forest understories. As these datasets rapidly expand, we argue for...

Plant longevity shapes ecosystem functioning and carbon storage, but evidence for its relationship with growth beyond trees has been limited. The authors show that slow growth consistently predicts gr...

637 trees re-surveyed, 2 rounds of revisions (with a very thorough Reviewer 2) and 3 years in the making... Another one of my PhD chapters has finally been published in Biological Conservation (open a...

Scientific Reports - Region-specific forest structure pathways reveal climate effects on old-growth tropical forest biomass

The Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL studies forest, landscape, biodiversity, natural hazards and snow and ice. It is part of the ETH Domain.

We measured leaf traits from historic and contemporary herbarium specimens collected from the same individual trees in the southern Peruvian Amazon and compared trait changes to local changes in clim...

As the world faces the twin crises of climate change and biodiversity loss, researchers are trying to understand how to restore degraded forests to most effectively sequester carbon, benefit…

Deviations from the usual climate are causing trees to die prematurely. Even favourable growing conditions can have a negative impact.

Forest pathogens have repeatedly restructured ecosystems in the Northern Hemisphere, where epidemics such as chestnut blight, Dutch elm disease, and sudden oak death eliminated foundation species and ...

Global report provides an alternative to climate breakdown, political extremism and economic tensions

We analyzed over 170,000 tropical ecology publications (1960–2023) using a large language model to extract study location and biome information at scale. We show that research has grown across all bi....

The authors use 34 years of seed harvest data from Poland, covering over 40,000 observations and five common species, to understand the impacts of climate change on tree fecundity. They show reduced f...

As droughts become longer and more intense, impacts on terrestrial primary productivity are expected to increase progressively. Yet, some ecosystems appear to acclimate to multiyear drought, with cons...

Tree crown damage from disturbance events strongly influences forest demography, yet its effect on stem growth remains poorly quantified, with both...

Abstract. Knowledge exchanges between Indigenous and scientific communities occur regularly, with researchers frequently seeking and benefiting from Indige

New research is calling for a fundamental shift in how Australian universities and scientists publish research that draws on Indigenous Knowledges, warning that current academic practices risk sidelin...

Wood plays a vital role in the EU's transition to a climate-neutral and circular economy. However, the climate mitigation potential of wood products depends on their final uses - something that has hi...

Reports on the health and vitality of the Amazon — often dubbed as Earth’s lungs — have been grim for years. Record drought has stressed large swaths of the world’s largest rainforest. Major Amazon…

Biodiversity assessment using passive acoustic monitoring has historically been challenging due to the limited availability of multi-species acoustic detectors. In this context, acoustic indices w...

A popular theory about how trees cooperate has enchanted the public and raised the profile of forest conservation. But some ecologists think its scientific basis has been oversold.

In the race to embrace new technologies, some ecologists fear their field is losing touch with nature.

A new, comprehensive study shows that Europe’s landscapes over the past more than 20 million years have predominantly been a mosaic of grasslands, scrub and woodlands of varying density. A light...

The authors find that historical deforestation has substantially altered regional observed precipitation over the southern Amazon basin through inter-regional atmospheric moisture transport, which is ...

Advancing plant behavior research requires robust experimental design, falsifiable hypotheses, sufficient replication, and stringent controls. A recent study claims that Picea abies trees collectively...

On trees, eclipses, and the perils of belief

In South Australia, climate change-induced droughts can cause dieback of Eucalyptus trees. Chloé Bentze and coauthors have studied how microrefugia knowledge can be used to strategically conserve a vu...

A new peer-reviewed study by European Forest Institute (EFI) researchers Harald Mauser and Magda Bou Dagher Kharrat, together with Bart Muys from KU Leuven, examines how current EU conservation status...

Abstract. Different regions of the tropics vary in overall tree species diversity, with the tropical Americas exhibiting strikingly higher regional tree sp