Read the summary and the most important questions on Primary forests are irreplaceable for sustaining tropical biodiversity

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• What is the problem description in the article of Gibson et al.?

  In tropical rainforests (with high biodiversity and increasing human pressure) human driven land uses threaten biodiversity. Also, the amount of primary forest is declining whereas secondary forest, degraded forest and plantations are expanding.

• What are the human driven land-use changes that occur in the tropical rainforests?

  -conversion of tropical forest into agricultural land and use for timber production.

• What is the goal of the research from Gibson et al.?

  To execute a global assessment of impact of disturbance levels and land conversion on biodiversity in tropical forests.

• What were the mayor findings of Gibson et al.'s research project?

  That biodiversity was substantially lower in disturbed or degraded forests. Other aspects they found were of influence are:
  -geographic region
  -taxonomic group
  -ecological metric
  -disturbance type

• What is the main conclusion of the study by Gibson et al.?

  When it comes to maintaining tropical biodiversity, there is no substitute for primary forest.

• What method was used for the study by Gibson et al.?

  A meta-analysis of 138 studies

• How was the effect size of human-driven land used measured in the study by Gibson et al.?

  By calculating the weighted average of the standardised difference between mean biodiversity measurements in primary and disturbed sites.

• How did Gibson et al. find whether the surrounding habitat was influencing the biodiversity in the examined forest?

  They repeated their study by only analysing studies on forests of which the surrounding habitat consisted of only natural vegetation (primary and selected logged forest)

• Which area showed the biggest effect size and what does this imply?

  The effect size in Asia was 0.95. Which implies that land-change use changes in Asia, regardless of the nature of these disturbances has a significantly more detrimental effect on the biodiversity of the tropical forest than in other area's such as Latin-America.

• What are land-use changes that are happening in Asia?

  expansion of oil palm monoculture and exotic-tree plantations