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Over the past decade Ebola hemorrhagic fever has emerged repeatedly in Gabon and Congo, causing numerous human outbreaks and massive die-offs of gorillas and chimpanzees. Why Ebola has emerged so explosively remains poorly understood. Previous studies have tended to focus on exogenous factors such as habitat disturbance and climate change as drivers of Ebola emergence while downplaying the contribution of transmission between gorilla or chimpanzee social groups. Here we report recent observations on behaviors that pose a risk of transmission among gorilla groups and between gorillas and chimpanzees. These observations support a reassessment of ape-to-ape transmission as an amplifier of Ebola outbreaks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article informs that tropical deforestation can cause fundamental regional-scale shifts in vegetation structure and diversity in Africa. Deforestation induces a broad suite of changes in land-surface properties that can act either competitively or synergistically to determine precipitation patterns. For example, replacing forests with grasslands reduces evapotranspiration, and, thus, there is less moisture to fall as rain. However, less evapotranspiration also acts to warm surface air, resulting in increased convection and subsequent thunderstorms.

The article illustrates the potential effects of deforestation using the extreme case of conversion on grassland in the Republic of Congo. Logging does not currently cause total forest loss in the region. Deforestation rates fluctuate in response to many factors including the supply of and demand for timber as well as human population growth.