SYNOPSIS Hope for Tropical Biodiversity After All

Much as Mark Twain famously stated that reports of his death were greatly exaggerated, it turns out that land animals in tropical protected areas may be better off than we thought. Cur-rent assessments warn of widespread biodiversity loss in the tropics—which is home to half of species globally—and put declines as high as 56 % over the last four decades. But now, in this issue of PLOS Biology, Lydia Beaudrot, Jorge Ahumada, and colleagues report that tropical for-est preserves around the world may be helping after all: at the community level, ground-dwell-ing mammals and birds are holding their own. Why the difference? Tropical forests are understudied, and most of the animals living there are rare and elusive, so existing biodiversity assessments rely heavily on aggregated secondary data and expert opinion. In contrast, the new findings are based on standardized primary data from camera traps in the Tropical Ecology Assessment and Monitoring (TEAM) Network, which give close-to-real-time snapshots of wildlife status and trends (Fig 1). Beaudrot, Ahumada, and colleagues determined biodiversity trends for more than 500 pop-ulations of nearly 250 species of mammals and birds, using half a million images per year from tropical forest preserves on three continents. The distribution of the 15 study sites reflected th