Consistent patterns of common species across tropical tree communities.

Trees structure the Earth's most biodiverse ecosystem, tropical forests. The vast number of tree species presents a formidable challenge to understanding these forests, including their response to environmental change, as very little is known about most tropical tree species. A focus on the common species may circumvent this challenge.

Radar vision in the mapping of forest biodiversity from space.

Recent progress in remote sensing provides much-needed, large-scale spatio-temporal information on habitat structures important for biodiversity conservation. Here we examine the potential of a newly launched satellite-borne radar system (Sentinel-1) to map the biodiversity of twelve taxa across five temperate forest regions in central Europe. We show that the sensitivity of radar to habitat structure is similar to that of airborne laser scanning (ALS), the current gold standard in the measurement of forest structure.

Five new species of (Myrtaceae) from Sulawesi, Indonesia.

Following ongoing ecological research on the tree diversity of the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, we describe five new species of . These are the first descriptions of species from the island since Blume (1850, and ), highlighting the significant lack of taxonomic research on the genus for the region. The five species proposed as new are , , , , and All species are illustrated and information on their distribution, ecology, and conservation status is given.

Elaeocarpus firdausii (Elaeocarpaceae), a new species from tropical mountain forests of Sulawesi.

Based on ongoing ecological research in mountain forests of Sulawesi, a new species, Elaeocarpus firdausii Brambach, Coode, Biagioni & Culmsee, sp. nov. is described and illustrated from mossy forests at > 2000 m and information provided on the species' distribution, ecology and pollen morphology.

An estimate of the number of tropical tree species.

The high species richness of tropical forests has long been recognized, yet there remains substantial uncertainty regarding the actual number of tropical tree species. Using a pantropical tree inventory database from closed canopy forests, consisting of 657,630 trees belonging to 11,371 species, we use a fitted value of Fisher's alpha and an approximate pantropical stem total to estimate the minimum number of tropical forest tree species to fall between ∼ 40,000 and ∼ 53,000, i.e.