Madagascar owns one of the world’s richest biodiversity hotspots. In some of the country’s protected areas, organized groups engaged in illegal logging have been felling ‘valuable rosewood trees and extracting other resources’ mostly from the Marojejy National Park and Masoala National Park.

To prove that illegal logging, a major cause of deforestation of the world’s rainforests, and illegal timber trade are globally recognized crimes, ‘the United States and European Union are putting in place new strict laws and regulations to stop the importation of illegally harvested and traded wood products.’

The international community and conservation groups in Madagascar have issued a joint statement calling for action against the dramatic increase in illegal logging on the island.’ Signatories of the joint statement include the embassies of France, Germany, Japan, Norway, Switzerland, USA, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), KfW Entwicklungsbank, US Agency for International Development (USAID), the World Bank, Conservation International, Wildlife Conservation Society, and the Worldwide Fund for Nature. By all indication, the campaign to combat the proliferation of illegal logging in Madagascar seems to be a serious international movement.

Madagascar has been committed to a ‘transparent wood control system that documents the legality of harvesting and sales’ as part of the country’s general commitment to protect its valuable and unique biodiversity. However, criminal groups continue to undertake the illegal harvesting of timber.

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Via WWF

The conservation of wild lands is well documented and neatly archived in history. Eviction of indigenous people from their homeland in the wild for the sake of conservation is only found in collective memory and oral history. Through a hundred years, indigenous people have often been seen by conservationists as a problem, and the solution has always been eviction.

On a widely more publicized scale, the battle to protect nature and biodiversity has been between transnational conservationist organizations and their nemesis, those insatiable industries that deplete or destroy nature. There is, however, another conflict: transnational conservation vs. the worldwide movement of indigenous peoples.

‘Big conservation,’ a very strong global movement, is often seen as arrogant by the native people. Indigenous people have always regarded big conservation agencies as agents of imperialism.

The conflict has given rise to a distinct group called conservation refugees. These people are not officially recognized and counted as refugees even if ‘the number of people displaced from traditional homelands worldwide over the past century in the interest of conservation is estimated to be close to 20 million, 14 million of them in Africa alone.’

The resolution to the century-old conflict in the wild is not about to be apparent to its stakeholders. The result is lamentable: thousands of protected land in the most biologically rich areas of the world cannot be managed.

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Via guardian.co.uk/Native Solutions to Conservation Refugees

For at least five miles, one can witness different intertwining plants, trees, creepers, ferns, mosses, and orchids that seem to be in a perpetual struggle for light and life. A tiny hummingbird nest holds an egg about to hatch and a baby already born. Bats fluff their wings while under the shelter of a giant leaf. A big black tarantula with orange legs can stay tucked for years in the same burrow, waiting for its prey. A cougar and a puma sprint across the vista.

At the Monteverde Rainforest, as in other nature parks of Costa Rica, tourists can choose a different way to visit the rainforest: sliding into it while fitted with a helmet and a harness attached to steel cables stretched between platforms overlooking the jungle called the ‘canopy,’ not far removed from how Tarzan and Jane did it. The trees can be forty feet high.

Natural abundance is the main asset of Costa Rica. Tourism complements the country’s income from coffee and, more recently, electronics. In the past, Costa Rica opted to devote a greater share of its national budget to education instead of the army. This small tropical republic is a charming treasure trove of biodiversity, to say the least. It has also been attracting a steadily growing number of tourists, at 2 million to 4.5 million foreign visitors per year.

Costa Rica is said to be home to 4 percent of the biodiversity on the planet. Nature alone is worth the trip to Costa Rica. Nearly a third of the land area holds a protected rainforest that is home to exceptional wildlife. There are more than 300,000 species of insects and more than 850 species of birds. The Costa Rican coasts provide breeding environment for five of the seven marine turtle species known on the planet. Between June and November, it is common to see at night the green turtles emerging from the sea to lay their eggs in the sand. Costa Rica’s crystal clear waters are also home to shoals of hammerhead sharks.

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Via Costa Rican Bird Route

An ‘e-Biosphere’ summit, organized by Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) which is based at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, will be held on June 1-3 in London. Approximately 400 personalities and authorities in the fields of biology and technology coming from 50 countries will discuss about the plans to design and compile an ‘Internet-based observatory of life on earth as a guide to everything from the impact of climate change on wildlife to pests that can damage crops.’

Hosting the discussions during the summit is Norman MacLeod, keeper of paleontology at the Natural History Museum in London, who says, “This would be a free system that everyone can access and contribute to.” 

The citizens of the planet are being requested to monitor life on earth and, through the Internet, link up their ground information and data to this giant database that is envisioned to become a most current monitoring of planet Earth. 

The project is inspired by the fact that many people the world over are already uploading on the Internet observations about the different parts of the biosphere such as flora and fauna. This colossal database may be the central repository of these bits of information. 

EOL believes that this ambitious ‘biodiversity overview’ can have far-ranging benefits such as monitoring of climate change, diseases linked to global warming, analyses for agriculture, and public safety, among others. 

Via Reuters

Forest fires that cause deforestation and habitat loss are also responsible for 20% of carbon dioxide emissions. It is a phenomenon that feeds global warming. Fire and climate are a tandem that goes back at least 400 million years, since plants began to colonize the Earth.

It used to be that forest fires resulted from natural phenomena such as lightning or volcano eruption. Now, almost 100 percent of such fires are caused by human activity, concludes a research at the University of Tasmania in Hobart (Australia) which has recently been published in the journal Science.

The scientific researchers state that, during the past decade, there have been major uncontrolled fires across all vegetated continents, regardless of national capacity to combat or control these fires. The researchers add that, together with their high economic costs, forest fires also effect human health. The study authors also assessed how fires affect the Earth in terms of ecosystems, biodiversity, carbon stocks, and climate. They warn that the current capacity to control fires may diminish in the future as climate change alters the patterns of fire.

According to the researchers, the phenomenon of forest fires is difficult to assess because fires are still poorly represented in global models which until now have not had a large consideration. This is in spite of the fact that 12 years have passed since the signing of the Kyoto Protocol which also globally attempts to control forest fires because they have shown high contribution to CO2 emissions which, in fact, is more than the combined emissions of all transport systems on earth (vehicles, ships, and aircraft).

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Via Science Agogo

In the research entitled “Primate species richness is determined by plant productivity: Implications for conservation” by Richard F. Kay. Richard H. Madden, Carel Van Schaik, and David Higdon, biodiversity is said to occur when the worlds of fauna and flora co-exist productively on the planet.

Natural habitats where plants are most productive are also the places where populations of primary consumers such as primates are greatest. This paper determined the correlation between the richness of primates and productivity of plants. This study’s thesis is: primate species richness is influenced by both historical biogeography and productivity, but not by tree species richness or seasonality.

There are observations in other peer-reviewed researches that are relevant to this study’s hypothesis. Patterns of species richness of local animals are caused by the richness of tree species, productivity of plants in the particular ecosystem, seasonality, habitat heterogeneity, and historically geographical factors.

Also, the richness of plant and tree species creates more and diversified feeding niches for primary consumers, such as primates. Another study found that increased plant productivity leads to increased species richness of animals because, at higher productivity, specialized species maintain viability.

The topic that the researchers/writers tackled was: what influences the local richness of Neotropical primates (platyrrhines)? According to this study’s researchers, there are very few sites for which all the variables of tree species richness, plant productivity, seasonality, habitat heterogeneity, and historically geographical factors have been measured, thereby rendering no conclusive assessment of the independent effect of these possible causal factors. Thus, this study’s researchers avoided the problem by examining the correlations of these variables with the intermediate variable of local rainfall.

The paper hypothesized that the local richness of Neotropical primates (platyrrhines) is related to rainfall, plant species richness, historical factors, and plant productivity. If more plant species bring about more and diversified feeding niches, then the number of primary consumers such as primates would be related to the richness of tree species.

If ripe fruit, a major source of energy for Neotropical primates, is a seasonal produce that is dependent on the length of the dry season, then the number of primate species that can coexist in a forest area is determined primarily by seasonality. If historical and geographic factors have played an important role in shaping platyrrhine primate richness, then there could have been more primate species per site in larger than in smaller geographically restricted areas.

The widely distributed Amazonian species was geographically fragmented during the Pleistocene period into smaller forest fragments, making them genetically divergent. When the geographic isolation was removed, the newly evolved species could have increased species richness. Lastly, if increased plant productivity leads to increased species richness of animals, then a bigger population leads to a more viable species.

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The destruction of animal and plant species in the rainforest has been rapid. The loss is permanent. According to the German environmental organization OroVerde, three different types of animal and plant life are made extinct every hour. The biggest killer of the rainforest is man. The ecosystem is disturbed and biodiversity destroyed with the incursion of man and his harmful and greedy activities and enterprises.

The rainforests exclusively contain around 40 to 75 percent of all species on Earth. 28 percent of the world’s oxygen is supplied by rainforests. Unfortunately, forest cover has been quickly depleting. The rainforest in West Africa has already lost 90 percent of its existence. Madagascar has lost 60 percent. Illegal logging is the killer culprit in the destruction of the rainforest. The rainforests in Indonesia would be lost to logging in 10 years, while Papua New Guinea in 13 to 16 years. Deforestation in the Amazon has escalated by 69 percent in 2008, as compared to 2007. According to the WWF, if present rate of logging continues, almost 60 percent of the Amazon rainforest could disappear by 2030.

OroVerde commissioned the Ogilvy branch in Frankfurt, Germany to come up with one of the most interesting graphic translations of the destruction of the rainforest in recent years. The intriguing print campaign came from the concept and execution of the ad agency’s creative team led by Delle Krause, Chief Creative Officer. Sonja Fritsch’s graphic design and Anke Vera Zink’s illustration are what brought the novel idea to life.

Via osocio