Oil palm expansion resulted in 2 million hectares (Mha) of forest loss globally in 2000–2010. Despite accounting for 24% (4.5 Mha) of the world’s total oil palm cultivated area, expansion dynamics in sub-Saharan Africa have been overlooked. We show that in Southwest Cameroon, a top producing region of Africa, 67% of oil palm expansion from 2000–2015 occurred at the expense of forest. Contrary to the publicized narrative of industrial-scale expansion, most oil palm expansion and associated deforestation is occurring outside large agro-industrial concessions. Expansion and deforestation carried out by non-industrial producers is occurring near low-efficiency informal mills, unconstrained by the location of high-efficiency company-owned mills. These results highlight the key role of a booming informal economic sector in driving rapid land use change. High per capita consumption and rising palm oil demands in sub-Saharan Africa spotlight the need to consider informal economies when identifying regionally relevant sustainability pathways.

Significance: Tropical forests constitute the largest terrestrial component of the global carbon budget. However, rapid agricultural expansion has left these landscapes highly fragmented, calling into question their capacity to cycle and store carbon. We utilized airborne mapping approaches that revealed changes in aboveground carbon and key aspects of ecosystem structure and function in forest edges along oil palm plantations in Malaysian Borneo. We found widespread evidence of significant changes in canopy structure and foliar traits related to light capture, growth, and productivity along forest edges that corresponded to declines in aboveground carbon. These changes underpin carbon declines that varied spatially, with far-reaching implications for the conservation of forest biodiversity and carbon stocks.

Ecosystems function in a series of feedback loops that can change or maintain vegetation structure. Vegetation structure influences the ecological niche space available to animals, shaping many aspects of behaviour and reproduction. In turn, animals perform ecological functions that shape vegetation structure. However, most studies concerning three‐dimensional vegetation structure and animal ecology consider only a single direction of this relationship. Here, we review these separate lines of research and integrate them into a unified concept that describes a feedback mechanism. We also show how remote sensing and animal tracking technologies are now available at the global scale to describe feedback loops and their consequences for ecosystem functioning. An improved understanding of how animals interact with vegetation structure in feedback loops is needed to conserve ecosystems that face major disruptions in response to climate and land‐use change.

Forest canopy height is a fundamental ecosystem property—influencing patterns of forest carbon storage and forest ecosystem responses to climate variability and change. Previous studies have analyzed environmental drivers influencing spatial variation in canopy height at landscape-to-regional scales; however, far less is known about the environmental determinants underlying regional and global scale variation in forest canopy height. Using the canopy height metrics products from Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI), a space-borne Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) instrument specifically designed to characterize forest structure, we analyze the environmental correlates of spatial variation of global tropical forest canopy height. Our study demonstrates that climate, topography, and soil properties account for 75% of the variation in tropical forest canopy height. Elevation, dry season length, and solar radiation are the most important drivers in determining canopy height both locally and regionally. These results emphasize the vulnerability of tropical forest structure to ongoing changes in the earth’s climate and provide a valuable empirical baseline for tropical forest management.