Land conversion and climate change have already had significant impacts on biodiversity and associated ecosystem services.Using future land-cover projections from the recently completed Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, Walter Jetz, David Wilcove, and Andrew Dobson have now evaluated how all of the world's 8,750 species of land birds may be affected by environmental change.

Tropical deforestation is the source of nearly a fifth of annual, human-induced emissions of heat-trapping gases to the atmosphere. Recent studies by Woods Hole Research Center scientists demonstrate that during years of severe drought, tropical rainforest fires can double emissions from tropical forests.

An interdisciplinary team of McGill researchers has uncovered a connection between growing economic inequality and an increase in the number of plant and animal species that are threatened with extinction.

Case Western Reserve University faculty member Matthew Sobel has joined a team of international scientists calling for better forecasting methods in predicting how climate changes will impact the earth's plant and animal species. They have reported eight ways to improve biodiversity forecasting in the BioScience article, "Forecasting the Effects of Global Warming on Biodiversity."

Too much of a good thing (nutrients or water) actually decreases the diversity of species in an ecosystem while it increases the productivity of a few species, according to a grassland experiment conducted by University of Minnesota researchers.

Biologists at the University of California, San Diego and the University of Bonn in Germany have produced a global map of estimated plant species richness. Covering several hundred thousand species, the scientists say their global map is the most extensive map of the distribution of biodiversity on Earth to date.

Maps of the sea surface temperature around Galapagos Islands and Cocos Island in the Pacific Ocean are being produced daily and are available online in full resolution in near-real time as part of the Medspiration project, an ESA-funded effort to represent the most reliable temperature of the seas on a global basis.