Positive aboveground biomass trends have been reported from old‐growth forests across the Amazon basin and hypothesized to reflect a large‐scale response to exterior forcing. The result could, however, be an artefact due to a sampling bias induced by the nature of forest growth dynamics. Here, we characterize statistically the disturbance process in Amazon old‐growth forests as recorded in 135 forest plots of the RAINFOR netwo...

Understanding the causes of spatial variation in species richness is a major research focus of biogeography and macroecology. Gridded environmental data and species richness maps have been used in increasingly sophisticated curve‐fitting analyses, but these methods have not brought us much closer to a mechanistic understanding of the patterns. During the past two decades, macroecologists have successfully addressed technical p...