But last week, the lower house of Brazil s National Congress passed a bill that observers say could drastically reduce forest protection.
and hills, give state and local governments more authority over forests, and relieve landholders of the responsibility of reforesting illegally cleared land.
if they have cleared forests illegally. Environmentalists hope that pressure from conservation groups and media attention on next month s United nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) in Rio de janeiro will influence Brazil s President Dilma Rousseff to veto the most radical elements of the legislation.
the bill is a revision of the country s forest code, which includes a requirement that landowners in Brazil maintain a minimum proportion of native forest on their land,
ranging from 20%in the Atlantic forest along the coast to 80%in the Amazon basin.
Although the code has been on the books since 1965, enforcement increased in the past decade under Rousseff s predecessor, Luiz In ¡
says Steve Schwartzman, director of tropical forest policy at the Environmental Defense Fund in WASHINGTON DC.""But the changes proposed in what passed the House are fully capable of reversing that trend.
argues that the forest code has become too burdensome. Pointing out that around 28%of the country s 851 million hectares is dedicated to agriculture
whereas 61%is forest, the organization says that by approving the law, Brazil s Congress has chosen"the path of sustainable agricultural production.
including one that would grant amnesty to people who violated the forest code before July 2008.
destroying 6, 600 Â hectares of wetlands and primary tropical forest. And they predicted that the trend will only get worse.
including mining, agriculture and five different classes of forestry. Scullion says that there is a misconception among locals that researchers are against mining.
says Brian Greenwood, an infectious-disease physician at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and co-author of the analysis,
says Greenwood. from Ref 1areas with seasonal rainfall (orange-red) are most suitable for seasonal malaria chemoprevention.
says Greenwood. Critics also argue that chemoprevention in Africa  is logistically and financially impractical because malaria ravishes impoverished countries with feeble infrastructure.
Greenwood says.""Now that they re widely distributed, it s clear that they re a huge success but not good enough.
President prunes forest reformsbrazil s vast forests lost some legal protections last week, but less than environmentalists had feared.
President Dilma Rousseff vetoed a dozen sections of the revamped forest code passed a month earlier by the lower house of Brazil s National Congress (see Nature http://dx. doi. org/10.1038
The revised code still requires that land  owners maintain a proportion of their land as forest
Rousseff restored obligations for landowners to restore forests that were cut down illegally, although she created exemptions that could relieve numerous small properties of this obligation.
Whereas the old forest code required landowners to maintain corridors of riverbank forest 30-500 metres wide,
and allow landowners to meet some of their obligations to restore forest with permanent plantations of exotic trees,
an ecologist at the University of S £o Paulo in Brazil who helped to organize an October 2011 position paper on forest-code reform."
Various agriculture and forestry initiatives at the state, national and international levels could help to maintain progress in reducing deforestation.
"We should have had legislation that gives economic incentives to farmers to recover their forests and manage their land in a sustainable way,
says William Laurance, a forest-conservation scientist at James Cook University in Cairns, Australia. Indonesia, the world s largest grower of oil palms (see Palm sprouts),
But vast swathes of forest have been cut down to make way for the crop, often in carbon-rich peatlands,
says Nigel Sizer, director of the Global Forest Initiative at the World Resources Institute, an environmental think tank based in WASHINGTON DC."
Krystof Obidzinski, a forest-governance researcher at the Center for International Forestry Research in Bogor, Indonesia, agrees that there is plenty of non-forested
because companies can get extra income from the timber, and it is also less likely to be inhabited by large numbers of locals who can claim land rights and financial compensation,
but translating forest clearance into emissions has remained a challenge. The picture is more complex than often assumed.
and the fact that forest debris cut in one year might be burned in another (see Carbon lag).
and policy-makers working at the intersection of forestry, agriculture and global warming. Many scientists are busy linking satellite measurements to field
and aerial studies to create more accurate maps of forest biomass, which can then be used to calculate emissions.
and setting the stage for a deeper analysis of the impacts of logging, agriculture and forest regrowth.
Richard Houghton, a forestry expert at the Woods Hole Research center in Falmouth, Massachusetts, says that the actual results are not necessarily surprising.
But he credits INPE with developing a solid emissions model that will help Brazil build on its forest-monitoring system and tackle emissions in a serious way."
INPE s analysis confirms earlier findings that deforestation is gradually moving into denser forests, which means that emissions per hectare are increasing.
The results also suggest that forest regrowth has had little impact on net emissions because many secondary forests are chopped periodically down.
INPE scientists say that secondary forests could have a significant impact on net emissions if allowed to regrow.
One question about the model is how to represent emissions due to logging. INPE scientists assume that some logging has taken already place in clear-cut areas
but they are still working on ways to account for broader timber operations. Earlier research suggests that fully accounting for logging could roughly double overall emissions from the Amazon (G. P. Asner Science 310,480?
And Sandra Brown, a forestry expert at the nonprofit organization Winrock International, based in Arlington,
scientists do need to better understand the way carbon is cycling through forests. And she says the next major challenge is for INPE to build the effects of widespread logging operations into its emissions model."
Brazil's Atlantic forests lose key speciesmammal extinctions in Brazil's Atlantic forests are occurring at least twice as fast as estimates suggested, according to the latest survey of the region.
Jaguars, lowland tapirs, woolly spider-monkeys and giant anteaters are almost absent in Brazilian northeastern forests, which are among the most ancient and threatened tropical ecosystems on the planet.
and the United kingdom, focused on populations of 18 mammal species in 196 forest fragments, within an area of more than 250,000 square kilometres.
by assuming that all 18 species were found throughout the forests'original area. They then compared the findings of their survey to these estimates.
Those early models predicted no threat to between 47%and 83%of all mammal populations in the northeastern forests
assuming that the forest fragments stayed the same size. According to Gustavo Canale, a zoologist at the State university of Mato grosso (UNEMAT) in Tangar ¡
even big forest patches are in fact largely empty of mammals a proxy for the general health of the ecosystem."
"Trying to predict the presence of those species only by looking at the size of the forest fragment doesn t work for the northeastern Atlantic forest,
The Atlantic forest once stretched from the north of Brazil down to Argentina, and almost as far west as the Amazon rainforest.
During the past five centuries, ranches, sugarcane plantations, logging and hunting have destroyed nearly 90%of the forest,
Estimates of earlier mammal populations were based on the relationship between forest area and its capacity to support various species
But those studies failed to account for the synergistic effects of habitat loss, fires, urban expansion and hunting on the fragmented forests.
otherwise survive in a fragmented forest end up disappearing as a result of those multiple hits, Canale explains. Canale and his co-authors spent two years driving along dirt roads in three Brazilian states to interview local people about the presence of large mammals."
which landowners are obliged to keep in compliance with the Brazilian Forest Code, did not fare any better than would have been expected had forest fragments of the same size lacked such protection.
In other words, private land owners in northeastern Brazil are turning a blind eye to hunting -or shooting animals themselves."
if legal reservations and riparian forests are protected in practice, says Jean paul Metzger, an ecologist at the University of S £o Paulo,
The Forest Code was changed by Brazil's Congress in April, after years of pressure from the powerful agricultural lobby to weaken forest protection.
The bill was vetoed partially by President Dilma Rousseff, but went back to Congress, where the agricultural caucus has been trying to further cut down its provisions for safeguarding forested land near rivers.
The site was one of many hotspots that still have especially high concentrations of dioxins after being sprayed with herbicides such as the infamous Agent orange (used to defoliate jungle vegetation) from 1962 to 1971.
The ABC funds low-interest loans for activities such as agroforestry, improving soil uptake of nitrogen and rehabilitating degraded pastureland.
a farmer needed to prove compliance with environmental laws such as the Forest Code, which protects native vegetation on private property
India s forest area in doubtto judge from India s official surveys, the protection of its forests is a success. Somehow,
this resource-hungry country of 1. 2 Â billion people is managing to preserve its rich forests almost intact in the face of growing demands for timber and agricultural land.
But a senior official responsible for assessing the health of the nation s forests says that recent surveys have overestimated the extent of the remaining forests.
Ranjit Gill of the Forest Survey of India (FSI) claims that illegal felling of valuable teak
and sal trees has devastated supposedly protected forests in the northeast of the country. He and other experts also say that an over-reliance on inadequate imaging by an Indian satellite system is making such destruction easy to overlook.
In February, the FSI, part of the government s Ministry of Environment and Forests, released the India State of Forest Report 2011.
This biennial survey used images from India s remote-sensing satellite system and estimated that forest covered 692,027 square kilometres of the country roughly 23%of India s land area a decline of just
and a much smaller loss than in Brazil, for example, where more than 13,000 â°km2 of forest was cleared over the same period.
"We have to accept the grave reality that the current figure of forest cover in India is way over the top and based on facile assumptions,
he has mounted a legal case for consideration by India s Central Empowered Committee (CEC), a panel of experts appointed by the nation s Supreme court to rule on issues concerning forests and wildlife.
and coal mining is ravaging the region s protected forests. He says that he has seen the deforested areas at first-hand
He is concerned also that the 2011 forest report records large areas in Meghalaya as open or dense forest,
DEPT, MEGHALAYAON a field survey last year, Gill and three FSI colleagues saw that parts of the Dibru Hills protected forest in Meghalaya had been illegally felled.
Gill also points to an investigation in 2006 by Meghalaya state s forest and environment department.
the Meghalaya state government claims that only 670 trees were felled in the Dibru Hills forest from 2004 to 2007.
But another state government report obtained by Gill documents similar illegal deforestation in the nearby Rongrenggre protected forest,
The report also found evidence that local forest rangers were involved in the illegal timber trade,
Other tropical forest researchers share Gill s fears about India s forests.""The ongoing loss and attrition of native forest in India is quite widespread,
although it isn t being captured by the government s satellite data on forest cover, says William Laurance, a conservation biologist at James Cook University in Cairns, Queensland, Australia."
"Much of this forest disruption is illegal, and encroachment into protected areas and reserves is not uncommon, in my experience.
Anil Kumar Wahal, the director of the FSI, denies that forest cover has been overestimated. The FSI team that conducted the field visit in May 2011,
of which Gill was reported part a few sporadic patches of felling, and old stumps in the field,
but nothing as glaring as felling of vast swathes of forest, he says. But Wahal admits that the"selective cutting of trees"would not register in the satellite imagery due to the technological limitation of the medium-resolution sensor used for the purpose of forest-cover mapping.
Gill notes that the instrument which flies on an Indian remote-sensing satellite, produces images with a resolution of 23.5 metres per pixel,
the forest survey should use a newer instrument, already operating on an Indian satellite, that provides a resolution of 5. 8 metres per pixel.
Gill argues that the FSI still needs to conduct more on-the-ground surveys to corroborate its satellite estimates of forest cover.
Without this reality check, it can be difficult to tell the difference between native forests and, for example, bamboo.
He is calling on the CEC to order a visit to the forests to investigate the extent of the destruction.
or improve 10 million hectares of forest. But if Gill is right, it faces a more urgent task:
to chart and protect the forests that remain
One-third of our greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculturethe global food system, from fertilizer manufacture to food storage and packaging, is responsible for up to one-third of all human-caused greenhouse-gas emissions, according to the latest figures from the Consultative Group on International Agricultural
Forest-code veto President Dilma Rousseff once more exercised her veto before finally signing off the long-delayed revision of Brazil s forest code into law on 17 october.
among other things, would have removed forest protection along rivers and slopes, and would have allowed lawbreakers to receive a blanket amnesty.
"The last thing we want to do is to destroy the forests or whatever is absorbing almost half of the CO2 that we are emitting,
and descend to the humid forest floor, staggering over debris and plants. Infected ants behave as zombies,
Eventually, an affected ant will stop on the underside of one leaf, roughly 25 centimeters from the forest floor,
we could not find any of the forest sites, he says. They were cleared all, gone and largely invaded by exotic weeds.
It is possible that the disease reached the United kingdom via infected ash timber or imported plants,
so reforestation may not be too arduous. The main task now is to identify resistant strains of ash a challenge that European scientists are already trying to tackle
says Joan Webber, a pathologist at Forest Research in Surrey, UK. Was it a new species of fungus,
The researchers report that the severe drought that hit the rainforest in 2005 had lasting effects on the forest canopy,
"The question of the underlying health of the forest is much deeper than the instantaneous response.
which used satellite measurements to estimate forest greenness using reflected solar radiation is that the data can be muddied by clouds and atmospheric aerosols.
So for the latest study, Sassan Saatchi, a remote-sensing expert at the California Institute of technology Jet propulsion laboratory in Pasadena, California, studied the forest s microwave silhouette,
"This is the first piece of really strong evidence that the drought has had a negative impact on the forest,
the forest edges could begin to transition to dry forests, he warns.""We d like to say something about how the Amazonian forest has been doing since 2009,
he says
Jungle search gives global count of arthropodsplant-hoppers, such as this Biolleyana costalis in San Lorenzo forest, are distinguished by the pattern of venation on their delicate wings.
  Maurice Leponce, Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciencesarmy ants (Eciton Burchelli) in San Lorenzo forest stretch across a gap and permit other members of the colony to walk
over them. Maurice Leponce, Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciencesa"blushing phantom butterfly, Cithaerias pireta, rests briefly on a palm leaf in San Lorenzo forest.
Maurice Leponce, Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciencesthe male elephant scarab beetle, Megasoma elephas fights for females and food with a formidable horn.
Thomas Martin, Jean-Philippe Sobczak & Hendrik Dietz, TU Munichentomologist J Â rgen Schmidl collects arboreal insects in San Lorenzo forest by fogging trees with biodegradable insecticides.
which is anchored to a rope extending across the forest canopy. Maurice Leponce, Laboratory Copyright: Royal Belgian Institute of Natural sciences
Most biologists consider African elephants to include at least two species the savanna elephant (Loxodonta africana) and the forest elephant (Loxodonta cyclotis.
656 Â square kilometres of forest were clear-cut between August 2011 and July 2012, compared with 6, 418 â°km2 in the previous 12 Â months.
furry animal scurried through the forest in search of insects. Its unassuming looks gave little hint that its descendants would one day rule the planet.
Fungi and roots store a surprisingly large share of the world's carbonthe largest fraction of carbon held in the soils of northern forests may derive from the living
Boreal forests cover about 11%of Earth s land surface and contain around 16%of total soil carbon.
that makes up the soils in such forests came from fallen needles, twigs and branches, says Bjã rn Lindahl, a fungal ecologist at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Uppsala.
a forest ecologist at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences who wasn involved t in the study.
a warmer climate might lead to enhanced growth of the boreal forest s trees and shrubs,
At this moment, brave conservationists are risking their lives to protect forest elephants from armed poachers, noted biologist David Ehrenfeld of Rutgers University at TEDX.
and Flora (CITES) took the unprecedented step of granting protection to sharks and various species of tropical timber tree in their final vote today.
Conservationists see the move into timber as equally significant, with several tropical hardwoods, including ebonies and rosewoods, added to appendix II."
Tropical forests unexpectedly resilient to climate changetropical forests are unlikely to die off as a result of the predicted rise in atmospheric greenhouse gases this century,
In the most extensive study of its kind1, an international team of scientists simulated the effect of business-as usual emissions on the amounts of carbon locked up in tropical forests across Amazonia, Central america, Asia and Africa through to 2100.
That same model produced the earlier prediction that climate change would lead to massive forest die off in the Amazon2.
which changes the outcome for the forests there. But in the light of new data and of improved modelling, the drying now seems a lot less probable.
says forest ecologist Daniel Nepstad, who directs the Amazon Environmental Research Institute in San francisco, "and the emerging view is that there is less sensitivity in tropical forests for climate-driven dieback.
But Cox points out that much uncertainty still exists in how forests will respond to changes in climate.
In another paper3, some of the same authors have shown that warming alone could have a massive impact on tropical forests;
for every 1 °C rise in temperature, around 50 billion tonnes of carbon would be released from the tropics.
That tropical forests will retain their carbon stocks long term gives a major boost to policies aimed at keeping forests intact,
such as the United nations'REDD programme on reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. But warns Nepstad,
there may be more immediate threats to forests in the next 20 to 30 years from extreme weather events.
The Biomass project aims to take radar measurements of global forest biomass to assess terrestrial carbon stocks and fluxes.
But data on global forest biomass a major store of land carbon and a key indicator of biodiversity are no less important,
satellite observations are needed to quantify global carbon emissions for tropical forests, for which no reliable ground inventories exist.
a  CO2-fertilized forest could have the opposite effect, sucking up carbon and putting the brakes on climate change.
how will tropical forests react if we put more CO2 into the atmosphere? says Carlos Nobre,
The experiment, the first of its kind in the tropics, would be modelled on free-air CO2 enrichment (FACE) experiments conducted over the past couple of decades in the young and biologically simpler temperate forests of the Northern hemisphere.
Since then, the Hadley team has lowered its estimates of the likelihood of drying and the resulting forest dieback2.
Because of the sheer volume of carbon cycling through the tropics, the fertilization effect has a massive impact on the amount of carbon that forests take up globally and on how much remains in the atmosphere.
and study the Amazon forest, says Betts.""Our model indicates CO2 enrichment, and we need to know how realistic it is.
The experiments in temperate forests   rings of towers that inject CO2 into circular plots   showed an initial fertilization effect,
but proposals have tended to fizzle out amid concerns about the feasibility of working in a mature tropical forest.
First among them is the forest s diversity: how could an experiment be large enough to be representative of a forest that has thousands of species of canopy trees and a cascade of plants beneath?
On this point, the scientists meeting in Washington simply threw up their hands.""At the end of the day, no experiment is representative of the totality of the biome,
and to monitor the peculiar growth dynamics of tropical forests. For instance, most of the trees in a mature tropical forest are hardly growing,
 with a minority quickly filling in gaps created by the death of old trees,
says Surendra Singh, an ecologist at the Forest Research Institute in Dehradun.""It s the first study to quantify the accumulation of persistent organic pollutants in ecosystems in the region.
The amounts of DDT in leaves are up to four times higher than those found in boreal forests in the Arctic."
the forests might reach a critical threshold in the next a few decades, he says. The results"are another warning of the way we use chemicals,
wood and roots. The sink varies from year to year, but on average it soaks up one-quarter of the annual CO2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.
The most extreme events can turn forests and grasslands from carbon sinks to sources. In 2003 alone, a record-breaking heatwave in Europe led to the release of more CO2 than is locked up normally over four years1.
which raged northeastward from the Bay of biscay, slashing forest biomass by 16 million tonnes. By the end of this century, model studies suggest,
After the 2003 heatwave, caterpillars devastated Mediterranean oak forests near Montpellier in France. Researchers have presumed that this triggered a large carbon release
CARBO-Extreme teams have conducted field experiments that simulated drought in different climates and vegetation types, from Atlantic pine forests to alpine meadows.
Deep-sea dive The film-maker James cameron is donating his deep-sea submersible to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts,
Louisiana. go. nature. com/xgylsf8-19 april The United nations Forum on Forests meets in Istanbul, Turkey;
it will discuss progress on a 2007 commitment to manage forests sustainably. go. nature. com/potx5i
Reaching densities of up to 350 Â individuals per square metre in woodlands, the cicadas can chorus at more than 95 decibels loud enough to harm human hearing as the males woo the females.
He and Andrew Liebhold of the US Forest Service in Morgantown, West virginia, analysed 45 years of data from the North american Breeding Bird Survey (W. D. Koenig and A m. Liebhold Am.
He proposes that the masses of cicadas trigger long-term changes in the forest that end up causing bird populations to crash after 13 or 17 Â years.
The die off sends a pulse of fertilizer into the forest that temporarily enhances plant growth
and their dogs so they teamed up with Alex Greenwood, head of the wildlife diseases department at the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin,
of about 3. 5 mg kg-1. Greenwood s team also compared mercury levels in the Mednyi foxes to those in the population on the neighbouring Bering Island,
says Greenwood.""The Mednyi foxes may be more susceptible to increasing global mercury levels. But Dominique Berteaux, an Arctic ecologist at the University of Quebec in Rimouski, Canada, cautions that the team has not definitively proved a link between mercury contamination
Now, they hope to transform it into a conservation crop that can be raised commercially in the shade beneath the Amazon s forest canopy, without cutting down any trees.
A farmer who introduced himself only as Rodriguez had found the plant in the forest near his log cabin.
If the shade-loving plants can be grown beneath the forest canopy, it could save trees that might otherwise be cleared for crops or for grazing.
But rising emissions from agriculture and industry industry threaten to offset some of the gains from forest protection.
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