The study by Souza-Silva and co-workers presents a comprehensive dataset and a foundational approach for assessing the legitimacy of logged wood in the Amazon basin—a topic of global relevance and high societal impact. Building on this dataset and further developing these methods will be critical for safeguarding the Amazon’s ecologically vital yet fragile forests into the future.

Rapid changes to the climate of the boreal zone have resulted in large-scale 'greening' and range shifts. Feng and others explain these changes at a global scale and with unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution, demonstrating a change in boreal forest demography toward younger stands, an increase in areal extent of boreal forests, and a northward gain that outpaced losses on it southern fringe. These ongoing changes further emphasize the importance of boreal forests to earth system processes and the work in the present manuscript presents a path forward for detailed studies of large-scale land cover changes.

This study provides an exceptional, high-resolution, specimen-level record of marine bivalve body-size dynamics across the Permian–Triassic mass extinction, one of the most extreme climate crises in Earth’s history. By distinguishing species- from genus-level responses, the authors show that post-extinction size reductions are driven mainly by faunal turnover and the emergence of smaller species, rather than by universal dwarfism within surviving taxa, thereby refining interpretations of the “Lilliput effect.” The identification of two distinct recovery phases highlights the complex interplay of evolutionary and environmental controls during prolonged climate stress and offers valuable context for understanding biological responses to rapid warming in the past and future.

Kaiho uses historic records of diversification, starting with the early evolution of metazoans from cnidarian ancestors 700-500 mya, to predict the future of metazoan life on Earth. In analyzing past records of diversification, environmental drivers beyond the typically considered meteorite impacts and volcanism, such as variations in solar irradiance and inherent climatic fluctuations, are included as major additional drivers. These analyses lead to the proposal that metazoan life will likely go extinct on Earth within the next 700 million years. This extinction will be driven by long-term increases in physiological stress resulting from warming due to increasing solar radiation, as well as decreasing O2 and increasing CO2 concentrations in Earth’s atmosphere. While gradual changes in the Earth system will likely cause a decline in metazoan prevalence, the final thrust to extinction will likely require a global-scale geological or astronomical event.