The global demand for rubber tyres is threatening protected forests in Southeast Asia, according to a study. Tropical forests are being cleared for rubber plantations, putting endangered birds, bats and primates at risk, say UK researchers. By 2024, up to 8.5 million hectares of new rubber plantations will be needed to meet demand, they report in Conservation Letters. This could have a "catastrophic" impact on wildlife, they warn. Species such as the endangered white-shouldered ibis, yellow-cheeked crested gibbon and clouded leopard could lose precious habitat, said the team led by Eleanor Warren-Thomas, from the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia. Also, the banteng, which is found in the forests of Cambodia. There's a lot we can do as scientists and the public to make rubber production more wildlife-friendly. "The tyre industry consumes 70% of all natural rubber grown, and rising demand for vehicle and aeroplane tyres is behind the recent expansion of plantations. But the impact of this is a loss of tropical biodiversity," she said. "We predict that between 4.3 and 8.5 million hectares of new plantations will be required to meet projected demand by 2024. This will threaten significant areas of Asian forest, including many protected areas." Eight-point-five million hectares is about the size of the land area of Austria. Biodiversity concern Rubber is the most rapidly expanding tree crop within mainland Southeast Asia.

Just 227 tree species dominate Amazon

Researchers were surprised to find that such a small proportion of species dominated the Amazon .
Despite being home to about 16,000 tree species, just 227 "hyperdominant" species account for half of Amazonia's total trees, a study suggests.

An international team of researchers found that the region was, in total, home to an estimated 390 billion trees.

Writing in Science, they added that the rarest 11,000 species made up only 0.12% of tree cover.

However, they added that the new data could help unlock ecological secrets held by the biodiversity hotspot.

The results were based on a survey of 1,170 plots and half-a-million trees across the six-million-square-kilometre area, often described as the lungs of the world.

The authors said that the underlying cause of the hyper dominance of the 227 species, which accounted for 1.4% of the estimated number of species in the region, remained unknown.

"We knew that, normally, a few species dominate ecosystems, but if you have a system that has 16,000 tree species but just 227 make up half of the trees, that was pretty surprising even for us," said lead author Dr Hans ter Steege from the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in the Netherlands.

He told the Science podcast: "We don't really know why these species are so incredibly dominant because they do not have any particular ecological feature that stands out."