Unravelling the costs of rubber agriculture on biodiversity

Rubber plantations are a rapidly spreading agroecosystem in Southeast Asia and they are likely to have profound impacts on biodiversity due to the disruption of the natural landscape. Therefore, researchers at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) studied ant biodiversity changes in Xishuangbanna, China after a forest was converted into a rubber plantation as an indicator for other invertebrates. The researchers found a sharp decline in the overall biodiversity o