Biodiversity declining in tropical forests, protected areas

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Biodiversity declining in tropical forests, protected areas
July 26, 2012 | Press TV

An international team of researchers has found that biodiversity is still continuing to decline in many tropical forests despite having protected status.

According to new findings published online by Nature, babitat disruption, hunting and timber exploitation will cause more biodiversity decline in areas that are supposed to be the final refuge for some threatened species.

"The rapid disruption of tropical forests probably imperils global biodiversity more than any other contemporary phenomenon," the report said.

"Many protected areas in the tropics are themselves vulnerable to human encroachment and other environmental stresses."

Led by Prof. William Laurance of James Cook University, Australia, the team studied data from 60 areas to assess the state of the world's protected areas.

The study covered regions in 36 nations across the tropics in Africa, Asia and South America, and the results were based on "262 detailed interviews, focusing on veteran field biologists and environmental scientists, who averaged more than two decades of experience".

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"Our study was motivated by three broad issues: whether tropical reserves will function as 'arks' for biodiversity and natural ecosystem processes," they said.

"Whether observed changes are mainly concordant or idiosyncratic among different protect areas; and what are the principal predictors of reserve success or failure."

Findings suggest that "protecting biodiversity involved more than just safeguarding the reserves themselves".

"In many cases, the landscapes and habitats surrounding the reserves are under imminent threat."

Researchers found that forest disruption, over-exploitation of wildlife and forest resources had the greatest "direct negative impact".

"Air and water pollution, increase in human population densities and climatic change" were found to have had a weaker or more indirect impact.

The team also blamed the activities outside the protected areas for the changes in biodiversity inside the protected areas.

"It is not enough to [protect] interiors while ignoring surrounding landscapes, which are being rapidly deforested, degraded and over-hunted," they said.

"A failure to limit inter-related internal and external threats could predispose reserves to ecological decay, including taxonomically and functionally array in species communities and an erosion of fundamental ecosystem processes."

Tropical forests are the world’s richest areas in terms of biodiversity.

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