At a Glance

The Amazon rainforest covers some 2.1 million square miles.It's a critical wildlife and plant ecosystem.Deforestation is the largest threat now, but climate change could overtake it.

A double whammy of deforestation and climate change could split the Amazon rainforest in half in the next 30 years, according to new research.

"Deforestation is currently the major threat to Amazonian tree species, but climate change ," scientists wrote in the study published this week in the journal Nature.

The study looked at species distribution and used current and future models for climate change scenarios, along with historical and projected deforestation levels. The researchers concluded that, by 2050, the 2.1-million-square-mile Amazon rainforest could split into two separate blocks, and the variety of tree species growing there could decrease by as much as 58%.

"For biodiversity, this ," study author Vitor Gomes, an environmental scientist at the Federal University of Pará in Brazil, told Earther.

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Deforestation in Brazil's Amazon rainforest hit this year, when some 459 square miles of land was cleared.

The vast Amazon is the largest rainforest on Earth. It's considered one of the world's most diverse ecosystems and is crucial to stripping carbon dioxide from the planet's atmosphere.

Besides deforestation from the logging industry, global warming threatens to make the rainforest uninhabitable for many of the plants and animals that call it home.

Those effects are harder to measure, and only exacerbate climate change.

"The impacts of deforestation are local. We can see clearly the area we are impacting," Gomes told Earther. "Climate change may impact the whole area. Climate will be changing all over the forest area."