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Emerging Threats to Tropical Forests

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Treetops at Risk

Abstract

The drivers of tropical forest destruction and key perils to biodiversity have changed over the past one to two decades and will continue to evolve in the future. Industrial drivers of forest conversion–such as logging, large-scale soy and cattle farming, oil-palm plantations, and oil and gas development–have escalated in importance, buoyed by rapid globalization, economic growth, and rising standards of living in developing nations. Biofuels are likely to grow rapidly as a driver of future forest destruction. Climate change is increasingly emerging as a potentially serious driver of change in the tropics, and some fauna, such as amphibians, are being decimated by emerging pathogens. In general, old-growth forests are vanishing rapidly and being replaced by fragmented, secondary, and logged forests. These various environmental insults often operate in concert, magnifying their impacts and posing an even greater threat to tropical forest canopies and their biodiversity.

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Acknowledgments

I thank Meg Lowman, Mark W. Moffett, and T. Ganesh for useful comments on this chapter.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Tropical Environmental and Sustainability Science (TESS) and School of Marine and Tropical Biology, James Cook University, Cairns, QLD, 4870, Australia

    William F. Laurance

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  1. William F. Laurance
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Correspondence to William F. Laurance .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. , Nature Research Center, North Carolina State University, 11 W. Jones Street, Raleigh, 27601, North Carolina, USA

    Margaret Lowman

  2. the Environment, Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and, Royal Enclave, Srirampura, Jakkur Post, Bangalore, 560 064, India

    Soubadra Devy

  3. the Environment, Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and, Royal Enclave, Srirampura, Jakkur Post, Bangalore, 560 064, India

    T. Ganesh

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Laurance, W.F. (2013). Emerging Threats to Tropical Forests. In: Lowman, M., Devy, S., Ganesh, T. (eds) Treetops at Risk. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7161-5_5

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