The Biodiversity Credit Market needs rigorous baseline, monitoring, and validation practices.

The nascent Biodiversity Credit Market (BCM) aims to boost biodiversity funding but mirrors the flawed carbon credit market. To ensure success, BCM should (1) use dynamic baselines with control sites, (2) monitor the populations dynamics of a large array of vertebrate and invertebrate species, and (3) assign credits through an independent, transparent, and cost-effective validation process.

Correction: Integrating tropical research into biology education is urgently needed.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.

Strong floristic distinctiveness across Neotropical successional forests.

Forests that regrow naturally on abandoned fields are important for restoring biodiversity and ecosystem services, but can they also preserve the distinct regional tree floras? Using the floristic composition of 1215 early successional forests (≤20 years) in 75 human-modified landscapes across the Neotropic realm, we identified 14 distinct floristic groups, with a between-group dissimilarity of 0.97. Floristic groups were associated with location, bioregions, soil pH, temperature seasonality, and water availability.

Integrating tropical research into biology education is urgently needed.

Understanding tropical biology is important for solving complex problems such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and zoonotic pandemics, but biology curricula view research mostly via a temperate-zone lens. Integrating tropical research into biology education is urgently needed to tackle these issues.

A general pattern of trade-offs between ecosystem resistance and resilience to tropical cyclones.

Tropical cyclones drive coastal ecosystem dynamics, and their frequency, intensity, and spatial distribution are predicted to shift with climate change. Patterns of resistance and resilience were synthesized for 4138 ecosystem time series from = 26 storms occurring between 1985 and 2018 in the Northern Hemisphere to predict how coastal ecosystems will respond to future disturbance regimes. Data were grouped by ecosystems (fresh water, salt water, terrestrial, and wetland) and response categories (biogeochemistry, hydrography, mobile biota, sedentary fauna, and vascular plants).

Haiti has more forest than previously reported: land change 2000-2015.

Estimates of forest cover have important political, conservation, and funding implications, but methods vary greatly. Haiti has often been cited as one of the most deforested countries in the world, yet estimates of forest cover range from <1% to 33%. Here, we analyze land change for seven land cover classes (forest, shrub land, agriculture/pasture, plantation, urban/infrastructure, barren land, and water) between 2000 and 2015 using Landsat imagery (30 m resolution) in the Google Earth Engine platform.

Woody vegetation dynamics in the tropical and subtropical Andes from 2001 to 2014: Satellite image interpretation and expert validation.

The interactions between climate and land-use change are dictating the distribution of flora and fauna and reshuffling biotic community composition around the world. Tropical mountains are particularly sensitive because they often have a high human population density, a long history of agriculture, range-restricted species, and high-beta diversity due to a steep elevation gradient. Here we evaluated the change in distribution of woody vegetation in the tropical Andes of South America for the period 2001-2014.

Biodiversity recovery of Neotropical secondary forests.

Old-growth tropical forests harbor an immense diversity of tree species but are rapidly being cleared, while secondary forests that regrow on abandoned agricultural lands increase in extent. We assess how tree species richness and composition recover during secondary succession across gradients in environmental conditions and anthropogenic disturbance in an unprecedented multisite analysis for the Neotropics. Secondary forests recover remarkably fast in species richness but slowly in species composition.

Legume abundance along successional and rainfall gradients in Neotropical forests.

The nutrient demands of regrowing tropical forests are partly satisfied by nitrogen-fixing legume trees, but our understanding of the abundance of those species is biased towards wet tropical regions. Here we show how the abundance of Leguminosae is affected by both recovery from disturbance and large-scale rainfall gradients through a synthesis of forest inventory plots from a network of 42 Neotropical forest chronosequences. During the first three decades of natural forest regeneration, legume basal area is twice as high in dry compared with wet secondary forests.

Have bird distributions shifted along an elevational gradient on a tropical mountain?

An upward shift in elevation is one of the most conspicuous species responses to climate change. Nevertheless, downward shifts and, apparently, the absences of response have also been recently reported. Given the growing evidence of multiple responses of species distributions due to climate change and the paucity of studies in the tropics, we evaluated the response of a montane bird community to climate change, without the confounding effects of land-use change.

Lowland extirpation of anuran populations on a tropical mountain.

Background: Climate change and infectious diseases threaten animal and plant species, even in natural and protected areas. To cope with these changes, species may acclimate, adapt, move or decline. Here, we test for shifts in anuran distributions in the Luquillo Mountains (LM), a tropical montane forest in Puerto Rico by comparing species distributions from historical (1931-1989)and current data (2015/2016).

A biodiversity hotspot losing its top predator: The challenge of jaguar conservation in the Atlantic Forest of South America.

The jaguar is the top predator of the Atlantic Forest (AF), which is a highly threatened biodiversity hotspot that occurs in Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina. By combining data sets from 14 research groups across the region, we determine the population status of the jaguar and propose a spatial prioritization for conservation actions. About 85% of the jaguar's habitat in the AF has been lost and only 7% remains in good condition.

Carbon sequestration potential of second-growth forest regeneration in the Latin American tropics.

Regrowth of tropical secondary forests following complete or nearly complete removal of forest vegetation actively stores carbon in aboveground biomass, partially counterbalancing carbon emissions from deforestation, forest degradation, burning of fossil fuels, and other anthropogenic sources. We estimate the age and spatial extent of lowland second-growth forests in the Latin American tropics and model their potential aboveground carbon accumulation over four decades. Our model shows that, in 2008, second-growth forests (1 to 60 years old) covered 2.

Biomass resilience of Neotropical secondary forests.

Land-use change occurs nowhere more rapidly than in the tropics, where the imbalance between deforestation and forest regrowth has large consequences for the global carbon cycle. However, considerable uncertainty remains about the rate of biomass recovery in secondary forests, and how these rates are influenced by climate, landscape, and prior land use. Here we analyse aboveground biomass recovery during secondary succession in 45 forest sites and about 1,500 forest plots covering the major environmental gradients in the Neotropics.

Toward an integrated monitoring framework to assess the effects of tropical forest degradation and recovery on carbon stocks and biodiversity.

Tropical forests harbor a significant portion of global biodiversity and are a critical component of the climate system. Reducing deforestation and forest degradation contributes to global climate-change mitigation efforts, yet emissions and removals from forest dynamics are still poorly quantified. We reviewed the main challenges to estimate changes in carbon stocks and biodiversity due to degradation and recovery of tropical forests, focusing on three main areas: (1) the combination of field surveys and remote sensing; (2) evaluation of biodiversity and carbon values under a unified strategy; and (3) research efforts needed to understand and quantify forest degradation and recovery.

Real-time bioacoustics monitoring and automated species identification.

Traditionally, animal species diversity and abundance is assessed using a variety of methods that are generally costly, limited in space and time, and most importantly, they rarely include a permanent record. Given the urgency of climate change and the loss of habitat, it is vital that we use new technologies to improve and expand global biodiversity monitoring to thousands of sites around the world. In this article, we describe the acoustical component of the Automated Remote Biodiversity Monitoring Network (ARBIMON), a novel combination of hardware and software for automating data acquisition, data management, and species identification based on audio recordings.

Contrasting patterns of urban expansion in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia between 1992 and 2009.

The global urban population is increasing rapidly, but patterns of urban expansion differ greatly among countries. Urban transition theory predicts that the shift from low to high urbanization depends on a country's history and level of economic development. This study describes urban expansion in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia between 1992 and 2009.

Land cover change in Colombia: surprising forest recovery trends between 2001 and 2010.

Background: Monitoring land change at multiple spatial scales is essential for identifying hotspots of change, and for developing and implementing policies for conserving biodiversity and habitats. In the high diversity country of Colombia, these types of analyses are difficult because there is no consistent wall-to-wall, multi-temporal dataset for land-use and land-cover change.

Methodology/principal Findings: To address this problem, we mapped annual land-use and land-cover from 2001 to 2010 in Colombia using MODIS (250 m) products coupled with reference data from high spatial resolution imagery (QuickBird) in Google Earth.

Asymmetric forest transition driven by the interaction of socioeconomic development and environmental heterogeneity in Central America.

Forest transitions (FT) have been observed in many developed countries and more recently in the developing world. However, our knowledge of FT from tropical regions is mostly derived from case studies from within a particular country, making it difficult to generalize findings across larger regions. Here we overcome these difficulties by conducting a recent (2001-2010) satellite-based analysis of trends in forest cover across Central America, stratified by biomes, which we related to socioeconomic variables associated with human development.

Implications of rural-urban migration for conservation of the Atlantic Forest and urban growth in Misiones, Argentina (1970-2030).

Global trends of increasing rural-urban migration and population urbanization could provide opportunities for nature conservation, particularly in regions where deforestation is driven by subsistence agriculture. We analyzed the role of rural population as a driver of deforestation and its contribution to urban population growth from 1970 to the present in the Atlantic Forest of Argentina, a global conservation priority. We created future land-use-cover scenarios based on human demographic parameters and the relationship between rural population and land-cover change between 1970 and 2006.

A contemporary assessment of change in humid tropical forests.

In recent decades the rate and geographic extent of land-use and land-cover change has increased throughout the world's humid tropical forests. The pan-tropical geography of forest change is a challenge to assess, and improved estimates of the human footprint in the tropics are critical to understanding potential changes in biodiversity. We combined recently published and new satellite observations, along with images from Google Earth and a literature review, to estimate the contemporary global extent of deforestation, selective logging, and secondary regrowth in humid tropical forests.

Patterns of genetic diversity and biogeographical history of the tropical wetland tree, Pterocarpus officinalis (Jacq.), in the Caribbean basin.

Studies examining intraspecific variation in plant species with widespread distributions and disjunct populations have mainly concentrated on temperate species. Here, we determined the genetic structure of a broadly distributed wetland tropical tree, Pterocarpus officinalis (Jacq.), from eight Neotropical populations using amplified length fragment polymorphisms (AFLP).

Urban expansion and the loss of prime agricultural lands in Puerto Rico.

In many countries where the economy has shifted from mainly agricultural to industrial, abandoned agricultural lands are lost to urbanization. For more than 4 centuries the Puerto Rican economy depended almost entirely on agriculture, but sociopolitical changes early in the 20th century resulted in a shift to industry. This shift in the economy, and an increase in population, has resulted in an increase in urban areas.

Synchronous leaf production and herbivory in juveniles of Gustavia superba.

Synchronous leaf production has been proposed as a mechanism to reduce herbivore damage to young leaves by satiating herbivores. To test this hypothesis, I measured leaf production, leaf survivorship, and herbivore damage on juveniles of Gustavia superba (H.B.