Emilio Vilanova

Global Warming Has Accelerated Significantly During the last decade, the rate at which Earth warmed increased substantially After removing the influence of known natural variability factors, the increase of the warming rate is statistically...

Global Warming Has Accelerated Significantly - Foster - 2026 - Geophysical Research Letters - Wiley Online Library agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

The future of Europe’s forest disturbance regimes– a thread.

Tl, dr: Disturbances from wildfire, bark beetles & wind will continue to increase in the coming decades. Under unabated climate change disturbances could more than double by 2100.

New paper out in @science.org doi.org/10.1126/scie...

How fires, storms, and bark beetles will shape the future of Europe’s forests TUM researchers have modeled how bark beetles, storms and wildfires could affect Europe’s forests. A doubling of forest damage is possible.

An international team led by researchers at TUM has calculated how disturbances could transform Europe’s forests by 2100:

www.tum.de/en/news-and-...

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Liana cutting accelerates tropical forest recovery at a fraction of the cost of tree planting

Agriculture Is Taking Over Grasslands, Wetlands and Other Overlooked Ecosystems This research provides the first global look at which commodities are associated with ecosystem conversion outside of forests and where the impacts may be greatest.

landcarbonlab.org/insights/agr... "...the world lost as much as 95 million ha of non-forest natural ecosystems, including grasslands, savannas and wetlands, to annual crops between 2005-2020, roughly four times the amount of forest that was lost to annual crops and pasture over the same period..."

Fabaceae emerge as amongst the most embolism-resistant tree families in Amazonia. Forests in the Brazilian and Guiana Shield regions, where Fabaceae abundance is high, are expected to have greater drought resistance than Western Amazon forests.

Large-scale patterns of tropical forest embolism resistance mapped across space and angiosperm phylogeny.

Combining measurements across the Amazon with 100s of floristic samples, Julia Tavares & colleagues report remarkable variation in vulnerability to drought.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Graphic with two parts, a map and a chart. Top section: A map showing intact tropical forests in northern South America, most of them in the Amazon River basin. Three locations are called out: 1 is in Panama; 2 is on the eastern border of Ecuador, near the borders with Colombia and Peru; and 3 is in Brazil, on the Amazon River. Undisturbed tropical forest areas are defined as areas where no disturbances were detected in a comparison of satellite imagery from 1990 to 2024. Bottom section: Dot plot with confidence intervals. For each of the three map locations, the chart shows the average annual change in mist net captures for insectivores and for the total bird community. For all three locations, the average annual change for insectivores is in the negative and is lower than for the total bird community.

Intact tropical forests are seeing mysterious bird declines. Is another “silent spring” brewing?

Learn more: https://scim.ag/4aCs0Er

Detected Shifts Towards Drought‐Adaptive Strategies in the Amazon Forest Over the Last Four Decades Amazon forests are facing hotter, drier conditions, and we used 40 years of satellite data to look for early signs of ecological change. Combining satellite observations with leaf measurements from m...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... "...Our results show signals of an early-stage forest functional transformation that could reduce forest productivity and carbon uptake, increase vulnerability to fire, and diminish biodiversity..."

Conceptual model of the expected role of dryland mechanisms along a climatic gradient from cool and moist towards hot and dry conditions, and their relevance for climate-smart forestry.

Ecophysiology for climate-smart forest management

#TansleyReview by Gessler et al. @wslresearch.bsky.social @arthurobuntspecht.bsky.social @annekempel.bsky.social @josegruenzweig.bsky.social

nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

#plantscience

This is the type of piece that should be open access...come on!

Scientists can’t agree on where the world’s forests are A deceptively simple question underlies many global environmental policies: where, exactly, are the world’s forests? A new study suggests the answer depends heavily on which map one consults—and that ...

news.mongabay.com/2026/02/scie...

🌳💧The Brazilian Legal Amazon region delivers rainfall generation worth US$20 ± 7 billion annually, with each meter squared of forest contributing 300 L of water per year.

@universityofleeds.bsky.social

👉Read more here: www.nature.com/articles/s43...

Why long-term science is needed in a short term world.

www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Historical deforestation drives strong rainfall decline across the southern Amazon basin - Nature Communications The authors find that historical deforestation has substantially altered regional observed precipitation over the southern Amazon basin through inter-regional atmospheric moisture transport, which is ...

New study shows that historical #deforestation has substantially altered regional #precipitation over the southern #Amazon basin, with #climate models underestimating this effect. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Pervasive increase in tree mortality across the Australian continent - Nature Plants Eight decades of forest plot monitoring show a pervasive increase in tree mortality across Australia’s forest biomes driven by climate change, jeopardizing their role as enduring carbon sinks.

Increasing tree mortality over time in Australian forests

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Variation in Tree Growth Increases With Global Warming In recent decades, considerable research has focused on the long-term trend of tree growth rates under global warming, yet little attention has been paid to trends in high-frequency tree growth varia...

Climate warming is generally making trees grow faster, but the greater effect is that tree growth is becoming more unpredictable, creating a threat to the stability of forests. New paper by Li & He (2026). 🧪🌏🌐🌲🌳

The Yanomami, an Indigenous group from the Amazon, is confronting surges in #malaria amid increasing illegal gold mining in their territory. Read 'Investigating the Yanomami malaria outbreak: gold mining and malaria': doi.org/10.1098/rsbl... #BiologyLetters

Overlooked deforestation from global mining activities in the 21st century - Nature Communications The study provides a comprehensive inventory of global mining footprints, finding that mining causes higher deforestation than previously estimated, with half linked to unrecorded activities, and high...

"Our results reveal that mining-induced deforestation is two to three times higher than previous estimates, accounting for 19,765 km2 of deforestation. Notably, over half (50.29%) of this deforestation is linked to unrecorded mining activities" www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🌴🔥 🍁

Forty years of tracking trees reveals changes in Amazon and Andean Forest diversity New research reveals significant recent shifts in tree diversity among the tropical forests of the Andes and Amazon, driven by global change.

environment.leeds.ac.uk/faculty/news...

Our new paper uses the Power of Plots to reveal how tropical forests are changing: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Warmer climate threatens the occurrence of giant trees in the Amazon basin Giant trees in the Amazon serve as critical carbon sinks and underpin diverse forest ecosystems. Yet, these emergent giants are increasingly vulnerabl…

A new study warns that climate change could wipe out large areas where the Amazon’s biggest trees can survive. If emissions stay high, up to 45% of their habitat could be lost by 2080.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Tree diversity is changing in the Amazon and Andes.

Belen Fadrique leads our analysis in @natecoevo.nature.com w/ 400 plots + 40 years of RAINFOR records.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Hot, drier, more fragmented forests are losing species. Many in the Andes + western Amazon are gaining them.

Tropical Montane Cloud Forests Have High Resilience to Five Years of Severe Soil Drought

🔗 buff.ly/rwpl5Xu

Oil helped build Venezuela’s science. Can oil now revive it? Decades ago, Venezuelan researchers helped the oil industry thrive. Now they hope to be part of its reconstruction

Oil helped build Venezuela’s science. Can oil now revive it? | Science | AAAS www.science.org/content/arti...

I’m proud to be a co-author on this study, greatly led by Belen, which uses four decades of plot data across the Andes and Amazon to reveal how tree species richness is shifting in response to global change. Sustaining and expanding long-term collaborations like this is of extreme importance!

Predicting the fate of tropical forests under intensifying heat Intense droughts have caused water stress and elevated mortality for trees in the Amazon, foreshadowing the future of tropical forests as the climate changes.

Intense droughts have caused water stress and elevated mortality for trees in the Amazon, foreshadowing the future of tropical forests as the climate changes

go.nature.com/4qpTWRv

Fig. 1 Tree species coverage in the Global Wood Density Database (GWDD) v.2.

✨ Paper spotlight ✨

(🧵 1/7) Beyond species means – the intraspecific contribution to global wood density variation
nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

I’m #hiring - Our company is looking for a Remote Sensing Data Engineer! If you're interested innovative remote sensing analytics and developing systems to scale-up reforestation projects, we’d love to hear from you. Our j.d. and links to apply are here: lnkd.in/gvzb_3ck
Reach out to learn more
🧪🌳🌐🍁

The red dot is a baby North Atlantic right whale trying to migrate up the east coast of the United states.

The blue streaks are fast moving shipping vessels entering and leaving New York City harbor.

One collision and the whale is dead.

We need *mandatory* speed limits for these vessels! 🧪🦑🌍