Collaboration can improve conservation initiatives through increases in article impact and by the building scientific understating required for conservation practice. We investigated temporal trends in collaboration in the tropical ecology and conservation literature by examining patterns of authorship for 2,271 articles published from 2000 to 2016 in Biotropica and the Journal of Tropical Ecology. Consistent with trends in other studies and scientific disciplines, we found that the mean number of authors per article increased from 2.6 in 2000 to 4.2 in 2015. We modeled changes in multi-national collaboration in articles using a generalized linear model, finding that the mean number of author-affiliated countries increased from 1.3 (± 0.6 SD) to 1.7 (± 0.8 SD) over time, and that increases were best explained by the number of authors per article. The proportion of authors based in tropical countries increased, but the probability of tropical-extratropical collaboration did not, and was best explained solely by the number of authors per article. Overall, our analyses suggest that only certain types of collaboration are increasing, and that these increases coincide with a general increase in the number of authors per article. Such changes in author numbers and collaboration could be the result of increased data-sharing, changes in the scope of research questions, changing authorship criteria, or scientific migration. We encourage tropical conservation scientists continue to build collaborative ties, particularly with researchers based in underrepresented tropical countries, to ensure that tropical ecology and conservation remains inclusive and effective.