Rainforest wildlife havens on brink of collapse
Outside destruction is threatening lush reserves designed to protect
world's richest biodiversity The health of protected tropical forests
and their rich wildlife, from exotic frogs and freshwater fish to tigers
and forest elephants, is on the brink of collapse, researchers have
warned.
Wildlife havens set up to protect tropical forest species have
suffered badly as a result of the huge deforestation and habitat
destruction going on around them, a large international study concluded.
The rich biodiversity of the tropical rainforests has seen a
significant decline over the past 20 or 30 years and the wildlife
reserves designed to protect them have not been immune to the
decimation, the scientists found. The study, the biggest of its kind,
took five years to analyse ecological data from 36 different tropical
countries with protected reserves. It found that about half of the
reserves are suffering significantly because of what is happening on
their perimeters.
"These reserves are like arks for biodiversity, but some of the arks
are in danger of sinking even though they are at best hope to sustain
tropical forests and their amazing biodiversity," said Professor Bill
Laurance of the James Cook University in Cairns, Australia.
"Tropical forests are the biologically richest real estate on the
planet and they're rapidly falling before the bulldozer and chainsaw.
Protected areas are quickly becoming the final refuges for many species
and ecosystems and we need to know if they're going to do their job of
preserving tropical nature," Prof Laurance said.
More than 200 scientists were involved in the study, published in the
journal Nature. They estimated changes in the abundance of more than 30
major groups of tropical species over the past 20 to 30 years.
"These included dominant predators such as tigers and jaguars,
larger-bodied mammals like elephants and tapirs, primates, freshwater
fish, old-growth trees, exotic animals and exotic plants, among various
others," Prof Laurance said.
"We found that around half of the protected areas are suffering, in
that they are showing evidence of a marked decline in reserve health.
"The other half of reserves are doing respectably well, generally
limiting key threats such as deforestation, fires and logging while
largely conserving their biodiversity. Among the suffering reserves,
it's striking how sweeping the declines in biodiversity tend to be. It's
not just one or a few groups but whole suites of forest-dependent
species that are declining," he said.
Even though about half of the protected wildlife havens in tropical
forests have done a good job, the vast majority of them have experienced
rapid and dramatic changes to their surrounding forests.
"It's flat-out scary how fast many tropical environments are
disappearing or declining. In the past 20 to 30 years, 85 per cent of
our reserves lost some or much of their surrounding forest, but only 2
percent gained any surrounding forests," Dr Laurance said. "The highly
specialised rainforest biodiversity in many protected areas is facing
profound threats as their surrounding lands are being hit by a tidal
wave of logging, fires and intensive human land-use," he said.
-The Independent
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