The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

about plants the way other people speak about movie stars. One tree he described to me as “charismatic.” ...

their best to avoid.) Every single group had tripped over his tent. Eventually he’d gotten s ...

A typical example of the species-area relationship, showing the shape of the curve. For the purposes of thin ...

were assumed to be inert, much like the Ilex trees in Silman’s plots. As temperatures rose, they s ...

The study ran as the cover article in Nature. In the popular press, the welter of numbers the researchers came up ...

standing in Plot 8, where we’d come across a strip of blue tape outlining the plot’s border. S ...

restructuring, some species will thrive. Many plants may in fact benefit from high carbon dioxide levels, ...

along the road, we saw a rainbow assortment of species: golden tanagers the color of buttercups, blue-gray tan ...

To find carbon dioxide levels (and therefore, ultimately, global temperatures) higher than today’s ...

CHAPTER IX ISLANDS ON DRY LAND Eciton burchellii BR-174 runs from the city of Manaus, in the Braz ...

are quite a bit bigger. Collectively, they represent one of the world’s largest and longest-ru ...

Forest fragments north of Manaus, as seen from the air. Lovejoy flew to Manaus and presented his plan to ...

America, even such dramatic figures understate our impact. The authors of the second study, Erle Ellis of ...

Brazilian and now has a job at the National Institute of Amazonian Research in Manaus. ...

Cohn-Haft identified as a yellow-tufted woodpecker, a black-tailed tityra, and a golden-winged parakeet. He ...

shelter in the fragments. But gradually as time went on, both the number and the variety of birds in the fragm ...

nest is blown out of a tree in a hurricane. The following year, all the chicks turn out to be males, a ...

the fragment, species may or may not be able to recolonize it once a population has been lost. Researche ...

looked like a monstrous pregnancy bulging from a tree trunk was revealed to be a nest filled ...

most other ants in that they have no fixed home. They spend their time either on the move, hun ...