Desmatamento zero na Amazônia: como e por que chegar lá (sumário)

Many tropical rain forest regions are at risk of increased future drought. The net effects of drought on forest ecosystem functioning will be substantial if important ecological thresholds are passed. However, understanding and predicting these effects is challenging using observational studies alone. Field-based rainfall exclusion (canopy throughfall exclusion; TFE) experiments can offer mechanistic insight into the response to extended or severe drought and can be used to help improve model-based simulations, which are currently inadequate.

In the south-eastern Amazon, positive feedbacks between land use and severe weather events are increasing the frequency and intensity of fires, threatening local biodiversity. We sampled fruit-feeding butterflies in experimental plots in a south-eastern Amazon...

In their Policy Forum "National forests in the Amazon” (30 Aug., p. 1478), A. Veríssimo et al. seem assured that a new system of national forests will solve the problems of uncontrolled forest exploitation in the Brazilian Amazon. Unfortunately, we are far less...