“In just two decades – a wink of time for a thousand-year-old tree – the ecosystem has been seriously degraded.” So says William Laurance, an ecologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Balboa, Panama. It’s a familiar tale of ecological woe, but with a twist. After loggers and ranchers have cleared parts of the tropical rainforest, even those forest fragments that remain change far more rapidly than expected.
The finding comes from the longest-ever study of forest fragmentation, which has been running in central Brazil since the early 1980s. Researchers have been conducting censuses of tree species in 40 1-hectare rainforest…
