Throughout human history, the world's great forest formations have yielded to logging, cattle ranching, and agricultural expansion after transportation corridors made them accessible to frontier settlers. The Brazilian Amazon could prove to be an exception to this...

Many tropical rain forest regions are at risk of increased future drought. The net effects of drought on forest ecosystem functioning will be substantial if important ecological thresholds are passed. However, understanding and predicting these effects is challenging using observational studies alone. Field-based rainfall exclusion (canopy throughfall exclusion; TFE) experiments can offer mechanistic insight into the response to extended or severe drought and can be used to help improve model-based simulations, which are currently inadequate.