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Abstract

Tropical forests house over half of Earth’s biodiversity and are an important influence on the climate system. These forests are experiencing escalating human influence, altering their health and the provision of important ecosystem functions and services. Impacts started with hunting and millennia-old megafaunal extinctions (phase I), continuing via low-intensity shifting cultivation (phase II), to today’s global integration, dominated by intensive permanent agriculture, industrial logging, and attendant fires and fragmentation (phase III). Such ongoing pressures, together with an intensification of global environmental change, may severely degrade forests in the future (phase IV, global simplification) unless new “development without destruction” pathways are established alongside climate change–resilient landscape designs.
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Volume 349 | Issue 6250
21 August 2015

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Published in print: 21 August 2015

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Acknowledgments

We thank the World Climate Research Programme’s Working Group on Coupled Modelling, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison, the Global Organization for Earth System Science Portals and climate modeling groups (see Fig. 3 legend for list) for CMIP and other model output; our three reviewers; and M. Irving and P. Zalazowski for assistance with the figures. S.L.L. is supported by the European Research Council (T-FORCES) and a Phillip Leverhulme Prize.

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Affiliations

Simon L. Lewis* [email protected]
Department of Geography, University College London, London, UK.
School of Geography, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK.
David P. Edwards
Department of Animal and Plant Sciences, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK.
David Galbraith
School of Geography, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK.

Notes

*Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]

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