A new study, The biodiversity cost of carbon sequestration in tropical savanna by Abreu et al. in Science Advances, has examined the past 30 years in the Brazilian Cerrado. Over this period the local authorities have encouraged fire suppression to reduce damage to the local environment and as a result the tree cover has increased greatly. However, the authors found that in areas fully encroached by forest, plant species declined by 27 percent and ant species declined by 35 percent.