bill laurance: it's an enormous challenge. it really is one of the great challenges is trying to document what is simply out there. and it's tough. i mean, there's no simple, magical answer for that. it takes muddy-kneed forest biologists to go out there with their various techniques and try to count and capture things. and it's a very slow, painstaking process. we have teams of field technicians that go out and actually climb the trees. and they collect flowers and leaves that use to help identify the species. we measure the trees. we study how fast they a dyi, which new species of trees are coming into our plots. narrator: the researchers found that plots within 100 meters of the forest's edge lost up to 36% of their biomass of old-growth tree species within the first 10 to 17 years of fragmentation. plots past 100 meters exhibited no significant changes in biomass over that same time period. dr. bill laurance: our fragmentation study of the amazon is a long-term study because things take time to change. they don't instantly

bill laurance: it's an enormous challenge.ave teams of field technicians that go out and actually climb the trees. and they collect flowers and leaves that use to help identify the species. we measure the trees. we study how fast they are dyi, which new species of trees are coming into our plots. narrator: the researchers found that plots within 100 meters of the forest's edge lost up to 36% of their biomass of old-growth tree species within the first 10 to 17 years of fragmentation. plots past 100 meters exhibited no significant changes in biomass over that same time period. dr. bill laurance: our fragmentation study of the amazon is a long-term study because things take time to change. they don't instantly disap. many of the trees would normally live between 400 ars and maybe 1,500 year what pps is most stunng is that we are seeing the mortality rates are just going through the ceiling as a consequence of these edge effects and these environmental changes that we are seeing associated with forest fragmentation. so it's obvio

and tropical biologist bill laurance is learning