World’s Tropical forests will be all but gone in just 20 years!

Current rates of deforestation suggest there will hardly be any
tropical forests left in 20 years. Sixty percent of the rainforests,
which survived for 50 million consecutive years, are already gone.
However, some experts say widespread planting of previously logged
forests offers hope for preserving some of the region’s rich and
unique biodiversity. Recent satellite data have shown that about
350,000 square kilometres of the original forested areas are growing
back, Greg Asner of the Washington-based Carnegie Institution said at
the Smithsonian symposium Jan. 12 at the Smithsonian National Museum
of Natural History, also in the U.S. capital. That is only 1.7 percent
of the immense planetary belt of original forest that once covered 20
million square kilometres.

Twelve million sq km have already been
cleared while another five million have been selectively logged, Asner
reported. “There is going to be lots of tropical forest left in the
future but it will be different forest,” says Joseph Wright of the
Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama. Marginal
farmland is being abandoned in the tropics and there is also a
large-scale migration of people from rural areas into cities. “The key
question is, what is the conservation value of this land?” Wright told
Tierramérica from Washington. “I think there will be a high level of
biodiversity.” Tropical rainforests are estimated to contain 80
percent the planet’s terrestrial biodiversity. They also produce 20 to
30 percent of the world’s oxygen and are part of the planet’s climate
regulating system. Ira Rubinoff, STRI director emeritus, wonders if
the new second-growth forest can provide a home to millions of unique
tropical species and the same ecosystem services. “These are not
trivial questions. The services tropical forests provide are extremely
important for the entire planet,” Rubinoff told Tierramérica. “We
don’t know the answers. We know more about the moon than the Amazon
forest,” he added. If second-growth forests are connected to primary
old growth forests, then species might be able to move into them. And
the regrowth areas would also have to be large enough and be
undisturbed for many decades to provide good quality habitat,
speculates Eldredge Bermingham, director and senior staff scientist at
STRI.

Many other factors are at play, including soil quality, changes
in precipitation and wind patterns, and hunting pressures. “STRI has a
new study to look at the regrowth of 650 hectares of old pasture land
along the Panama Canal in hopes of answering some of these questions,”
he said. However, the study will have to run 25 years. By human-time
scales, tropical forests are ancient. “There are lots of trees 500 to
1,500 years old in primary forests,” said William Laurance, an STRI
researcher and chair of the Smithsonian symposium. While secondary and
degraded forests are better than pasture lands, they will sustain only
a fraction of existing animal species, Laurance told Tierramérica in
an interview from Panama City. “In biodiversity terms, this is akin to
a barn door closing after the horses have escaped,” he said.
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=45586

To keep this blog going it has to keep growing!

What’s most essential is you click below to: comment, email, repost,
share this…