The Boiling River: A Hot Spot for Studying Climate Change in the Amazon

Temperatures are increasing almost everywhere on Earth due to climate change. To understand what hotter temperatures will mean for tropical rainforests, researchers are studying the trees and other plants growing around the Boiling River in the Peruvian Amazon. At the Boiling River, hot waters warm the surrounding area, creating the hottest forest on Earth and making a unique, natural warming experiment. In our recent study, we found that many types of trees do not grow in the hotter forests, and as a result, the number of tree species in the hotter forests is much lower than in the cooler, normal forests. The research at the Boiling River provides important evidence that rising temperatures can have a negative effect on tropical forests, and that global warming could cause many tropical tree species to go extinct.