Among the hundreds of species of woody vines that University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee ecologist Stefan Schnitzer has encountered in the tropical forests of Panama, the largest has a stalk nearly 20 inches in circumference.

Among the hundreds of species of woody vines that University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee ecologist Stefan Schnitzer has encountered in the tropical forests of Panama, the largest has a stalk nearly 20 inches in circumference.

Improved management of the world’s tropical forests has major implications for humanity’s ability to reduce its contribution to climate change, according to a paper published today in the international journal, Science.

In many regions of the world, the impact of human activity on the environment intensified considerably over the past century. The high world population growth rate and the expansion of areas given over to crop production associated with climatic changes (longer periods of drought, irregular rainfall patterns) induced by global warming, have contributed to the acceleration of desertification.

A study by UC Irvine ecologists finds that excess nitrogen in tropical forests boosts plant growth by an average of 20 percent, countering the belief that such forests would not respond to nitrogen pollution.

World Wildlife Fund scientists said today that the discovery of 11 new animal and plant species in a remote area in central Vietnam underscores the importance of conservation efforts in the ancient tropical forests of the region.

The high biodiversity in tropical forests has both fascinated and puzzled ecologists for more than half a century. In the hopes of finding an answer to this puzzle, ecologists have turned their attention to the spatial patterns of such communities and mapped the location of each tree with a stem larger than a pencil in plots covering 25 to 52ha of tropical forest around the world.

In an ironic twist, 11 countries that have avoided widespread destruction of their tropical forest are at risk of being left out of an emerging carbon market intended to promote rainforest conservation to combat climate change.

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.

New charcoal and plant microfossil evidence from Mexico's Central Balsas valley links a pivotal cultural shift, crop domestication in the New World, to local and regional environmental history. Agriculture in the Balsas valley originated and diversified during the warm, wet, postglacial period following the much cooler and drier climate in the final phases of the last ice age.

Looking at a rainforest it's easy to see that there are hundreds of different tropical plant species that inhabit the forest. Although the patterns of plant distributions in tropical forests have been widely studied, the reasonings behind these patterns are not as well known. This study, published in Nature, explores these patterns.