Conservation of Tropical Forests

Veranda AWNC in T&T

The rainforest is lush and large!

There is often a break in the canopy offering a glimpse of sunlight.

My first experience in a tropical rainforest!

Rainforest Cycle & our (human) concerns

1000+ year rotation occurs naturally However, many people are worried b/c there has

been rapid depletion of the rainforests during modern times

There are no highly quantified numbers of what is actually being cut, in fact, you can fly over the Amazon for hours only seeing closed canopy!

The largest and most famous rainforest is the Amazon rainforest of South America. There are other rainforests in Africa and Asia. The rainforests are shown as the colored areas in this diagram.

Amazon rainforest

Aerial view of the Amazon rainforest

Picture courtesy of PhotoLibrary.com

Arial view of a river meandering through the Amazon Rainforest

From Southwestern College website

Amazon

Amazon tree fall

There is a plethora of information on this topic on the web. Here’s one site: The Amazon Rainforest is an interactive

study about the deforestation that is occurring in the Brazilian section of the Amazon rainforest (also known as Brazilian Amazonia). A variety of hyperlinks are provided to investigate the impact of deforestation on the rainforest ecosystem and the global implications of this.

At least 16 per cent of Brazil's Amazon rainforest has been lost.

http://www.longman.com.au/atlas/compweb/001/intro.html

And another: The Amazon rainforest - a world resource the original size of the rainforest was around 6

million square kilometers, making it larger than western Europe

the Amazon now accounts for between 30% and 50% of the world's remaining rainforest

there is a greater variety of animals and plants in a few hectares of the Amazon rainforest than in the whole of Europe

75% of the world's living species are found in the Amazon rainforest

the Amazon rainforest contains an estimated 2,500 species of trees

there are estimated to be between two and 30 million different species of insects

the diversity of life is so great that only about 1% of species has been studied by scientists

some estimates suggest that hundreds of species are being made extinct every day because of forest clearance

Unfortunately, the world's rainforests are being rapidly cleared for farming, mining and timber.

Given the rate of forest clearance it may be that we will never know the true level of the Amazon rainforests' natural wealth. Species will become extinct before we even know of their existence.

Rainforest destruction The rainforests are being cleared away so that

people can make profits from their resources. This cannot go on forever. It is not a sustainable way of using the forests. Once the forest is cleared, the fragile ecosystem is destroyed. The unique plants and animals are lost forever. Many people argue that we need to find a more sustainable way of using these precious biological resources for the future.

http://www.learn.co.uk/edenproject/lessons/plant2/activity2.htm

The End?