THE pristine rainforests of the Amazon are changing. And this time the loggers aren’t to blame. Taller, fast-growing canopy trees are becoming more common, and the slow-growing trees of the understorey are becoming rarer.
The subtle shift may be caused by increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and it threatens to reduce the Amazon basin’s role as a sink for excess CO2.
This discovery comes from a study of 18 undisturbed plots in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon that have been monitored since the 1980s. Tropical ecologist Bill Laurance of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Balboa,…
