## Frogs, forests and forest cocoa: five stories from the tropics
Seventeen years ago, a Panamanian golden frog vanished from a mountain stream and never came back. This spring, a small team waded into a similar stream carrying mesh pens full of captive-bred frogs, determined to find out whether the species could return home. That act of cautious optimism sets the tone for this tour of tropical-forest science, from a Panamanian cloud forest that has just yielded a tree new to science — and already on the brink — to a satellite count showing the Amazon’s chainsaws falling quiet.
### Panama: bringing back a frog that “disappeared” in 2009
No one had seen a Panamanian golden frog (*Atelopus zeteki*) in the wild since 2009, after an amphibian fungal disease, chytridiomycosis, swept through Panama reaching El Valle de Anton, the last stronghold of golden frogs, in 2004. Researchers had seen the wave coming: Smithsonian scientists had predicted these declines based on the pattern of disease spread, prompting the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) and the National Zoo to found the Panama Amphibian Rescue and Conservation Project (PARC), an ark for the country’s most imperilled amphibians.
Now that ark is being tested in the wild. In February, PARC director Roberto Ibañez and colleagues released 100 golden frogs in soft-release pens, known as mesocosms, and came back to monitor them post-release. The results were sobering: the frogs initially spent 12 weeks in the mesocosms, and about 70% of the animals died from chytridiomycosis. Yet the team insists the losses are themselves data. As conservation biologist Brian Gratwicke put it, “Our earlier modeling suggested there may be release sites we can select that will be climatic refuges—places that are suitable for the frogs but too hot for the fungus… if we discover signs that they regain their skin toxins, that will be important information as we roll out our release trials to other more climatically favorable places.” The golden frogs follow three other Panamanian amphibians — crowned tree frogs, Pratt’s rocket frogs and lemur leaf frogs — released in 2025, with excellent survivorship of lemur leaf frogs, while acoustic monitoring indicates the other two species are surviving as well.
[Read more at Smithsonian Voices](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/blogs/smithsonian-tropical-research-institute/2026/02/26/smithsonians-panama-amphibian-rescue-and-conservation-project-releases-panamas-critically-endangered-golden-frogs-into-the-wild/).
### Panama: a tree named and endangered in the same breath
Not every Panamanian discovery ends so hopefully. On a single mountainside in western Panama, STRI botanist Jorge Aranda noticed something odd while comparing plant specimens collected nearly 25 years apart: an unnamed species of Clusia, a genus known for bird-dispersed, orange-arilled seeds. Distinguishing it took careful anatomy, since what set the tree apart was size: its leaves measured only about 0.4 to 1.5 inches long, and compared with close relatives, its flowers carried fewer pollen-bearing parts and its fruit bore a different shape. The tree, Clusia nanophylla, was formally described on 6 December 2025 — but when Aranda’s team went back for more samples, the population looked thinner than expected.
The scale of its precariousness is stark: Clusia nanophylla is known from a single mountain area between Hato Chamí and Hato Ratón in western Panama, where road building and pasture expansion are cutting into that habitat. Researchers calculated the occupied area at about 4.6 square miles… classed the tree as Critically Endangered, facing an extremely high extinction risk. As Aranda told Earth.com, “It’s an arduous process, and it takes a lot of time, from collecting samples with all the plant parts… measuring everything and describing every aspect of the plant.” Panama’s forests, it seems, are still yielding new species — often on the very edge of vanishing.
[Read more at Earth.com](https://www.earth.com/news/tree-species-discovered-in-panama-is-already-at-risk-of-extinction/).
### Central America: three nations, one forest, one pact
Further north, Belize, Guatemala and Mexico used March to formalise a trilateral pact for the Greater Maya Forest, one of the Americas’ largest remaining tropical forest blocks. According to Belize’s government press office, the agreement formalizes coordinated actions under the Greater Maya Forest Biocultural Corridor to protect biodiversity, maintain ecological connectivity and address shared environmental threats, building on a declaration signed the previous August. The practical priorities are notably concrete: strengthening the conservation and connectivity of protected areas, enhancing climate change mitigation and adaptation, and scaling up joint efforts to combat forest fires, illegal logging, wildlife trafficking, and environmental pollution, with coordinated protection of key species such as the jaguar and scarlet macaw, which are vital indicators of ecosystem health singled out for 2026–2027. Notably, the initiative promotes sustainable livelihoods through regenerative agriculture, community-based tourism, and renewable energy, ensuring that conservation efforts translate into tangible social and economic opportunities, particularly for forest-dependent and indigenous communities. The MoU runs for an initial five years, with an option to renew — a modest bet that three governments can out-coordinate the loggers and poachers working across their shared border. [Read the release from the Government of Belize](https://www.pressoffice.gov.bz/belize-guatemala-and-mexico-sign-mou-to-protect-the-greater-maya-forest/).
### The Amazon: deforestation’s quietest half-year in a decade
Meanwhile in Brazil, the numbers are moving the right way, at least for now. Satellite data from the national space agency INPE show that deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has fallen to its lowest level in the past 10 years. Between January and June of 2025, a total of 2,090 square kilometers (807 square miles) of deforestation was recorded… in the same months of 2026, the total deforested area was 1,295 sq km (500 sq mi), marking a 38% decrease. Ane Alencar of the Amazon Environmental Research Institute called it proof of agency, not luck: “This shows that the political will to fight deforestation has prevailed… deforestation is not an inevitable process and its reduction is responsive to decisions made by society and the government.”
The caveat matters as much as the headline: Alencar herself said that a drop in deforestation does not mean that the Amazon is protected, noting illegal gold mining and forest fires as live threats. It’s real progress, hard-won and easily reversible.
[Read more at Mongabay](https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2026/07/amazon-deforestation-falls-to-10-year-low-in-first-half-of-2026/).
### Ecuador: how forests really heal
Finally, a study complicating the simple idea that a cleared tropical forest can just “grow back.” Researchers sampling 62 plots across farmland, secondary forest and old growth in a lowland Ecuadorian rainforest tracked recovery across trees, birds, mammals, insects and microbes alike. The topline finding is encouraging: secondary forests—those regrowing after clearance—now account for roughly 70% of tropical forest area… these landscapes can regain much of their biological richness within a few decades, provided they are allowed to recover, with many groups returning to levels close to old-growth within 30 years, or sooner, as mobile pollinators like bees, birds and bats show particularly rapid gains.
But abundance is not identity. While abundance and diversity can exceed 90% of old-growth levels within three decades, similarity in species composition reaches only about three-quarters of that benchmark over the same period… full recovery… can take much longer—often several decades, and in some cases centuries. Some groups barely move at all: soil bacteria show high resistance but little evidence of return. Even the starting point matters — forests regenerating from former cacao plantations tend to recover more quickly than those from pasture. The upshot isn’t pessimism but precision: secondary forests are valuable reservoirs of biodiversity, though not a shortcut back to what was lost.
[Read more at Mongabay](https://news.mongabay.com/2026/04/how-quickly-do-tropical-forests-recover-faster-than-expected-but-slower-than-it-seems/).