A plane crashed deep in the Amazon rain forest on Thursday. Out of the eleven on board, nine Brazilian plane crash survivors were found safe by local Indians.

Study warns that if tropical plant and animal species are driven uphill by global warming, lowland rainforests may be left without replacements

Half a century after most of Costa Rica's rainforests were cut down, researchers from the Boyce Thompson Institute took on a project that many thought was impossible - restoring a tropical rainforest ecosystem.

Protected forest strips buffering rivers and streams of the Amazon rainforest should be significantly wider than the current legal requirement, according to pioneering new research by scientists at the University of East Anglia (UEA).

As world leaders prepare to discuss conservation-friendly carbon credits in Bali and a regional initiative threatens a new wave of deforestation in the South American tropics, new research from the University of East Anglia and Brazil's Goeldi Museum highlights once again the irreplaceable importance of primary rain forest.

An unprecedented development plan to link South America’s economies through new transportation, energy and telecommunications projects could destroy much of the Amazon rainforest in coming decades, according to a new study by Conservation International (CI) scientist Tim Killeen.

During the last glaciation, which ended about 10 000 years Before Present (BP), the Brazilian Atlantic forest extended over all the eastern side of the country, covering more than 1 200 000 kmІ, 15% of Brazil’s territory. Now only 95 000 kmІ of this natural habitat survives, just 8% of its initial extent. It is still a large biodiversity reservoir in Brazil, second only to the Amazonian forest.

A trio of new studies published in Science this week provides examples of successful conservation efforts on three continents.

The long-held belief that plant-eating insects in tropical forests are picky eaters that stay “close to home” – dining only on locale-specific vegetation – is being challenged by new research findings that suggest these insects feast on a broader menu of foliage and can be consistently found across hundreds of miles of tropical forestland.

A new regional study shows that land-use policies in Peru have been key to tempering rainforest degradation and destruction in that country. Scientists at the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology led an international effort to analyze seven years of high-resolution satellite data covering most (79%) of the Peruvian Amazon for their findings.

Rainforests are the world’s treasure houses of biodiversity, but all rainforests are not the same. Biodiversity may be more evenly distributed in some forests than in others and, therefore, may require different management and preservation strategies. That is one of the conclusions of a large-scale Smithsonian study of a lowland rainforest in New Guinea, published in the Aug. 9 issue of the journal Nature.

Celebrated in Buddhist temples and cultivated for its wood and cottony fibers, the kapok tree now is upsetting an idea that biologists have clung to for decades: the notion that African and South American rainforests are similar because the continents were connected 96 million years ago.