Forests worldwide are becoming uniform

A global analysis of 31,000+ tree species reveals fast-growing species increasingly dominate at the expense of diversity. Simultaneously, species turnover — the rate at which ecological communities change their composition — has slowed by approximately one-third since the 1970s. The biosphere is simplifying itself. Fast growers out-compete. Slow adapters disappear. The ecosystem's capacity for dynamic response decreases as the environment's rate of change increases. This signal occupies zero ...