The Fall armyworm (Spodoptera frugiperda), a lepidopteran pest that feeds on leaves and stems of as many as 100 plant species, is able to hop between different crops and cause serious damage due to its resistance to both insecticides and transgenic plants that are genetically engineered to express proteins with insecticidal action obtained from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis Berliner (Bt).
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Tropical forests around the world play a key role in the global carbon cycle and harbour more than half of the species worldwide. However, increases in land use during the past decades caused unprecedented losses of tropical forest. Scientists at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) have adapted a method from physics to mathematically describe the fragmentation of tropical forests. In the scientific journal Nature, they explain how this allows to model and understand the fragmentation of forests on a global scale. They found that forest fragmentation in all three continents is close to a critical point beyond which fragment number will strongly increase. This will have severe consequences for biodiversity and carbon storage.
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