The western Amazon is the most biologically rich part of the Amazon basin and is home to a great diversity of indigenous ethnic groups, including some of the world's last uncontacted peoples living in voluntary isolation. Unlike the eastern Brazilian Amazon, it is still a largely intact ecosystem. Underlying this landscape are large reserves of oil and gas, many yet untapped. The growing global demand is leading to unprecedented exploration and development in the region.

In May 2005, the Arunachal Pradesh government filed an application in the Supreme Court regarding the Subansiri (Lower) project, expressing serious concerns about large storage dams: "

COURTESY

Need for identification and value assessment of agro-biodiversity heritage sites in the context of recent Acts has been highlighted to facilitate conservation and evolution of sustainable agriculture.

Despite two centuries of effort in characterizing environmental gradients of species richness in search of universal patterns, surprisingly few of these patterns have been widely acknowledged. Here we show that when resampling a data set comprising 400,000 records for 3,046 Pyrenean floristic species at different scales of analysis (achieved by varying grain size and the extent of the gradients sampled), the derived species richness pattern changed progressively from hump-shaped to a monotonic pattern as the scale of extent diminished.

Oil palm is one of the world's most rapidly expanding equatorial crops. The two largest oil palm-producing countries

Biologists in Madagascar have come up with a highly detailed conservation plan using a new tool for identifying biodiversity hotspots, which analyses an unprecedented range of species over small geographical areas.