Posts Tagged ‘ ecosystem

Why Are Tigers Endangered?


Habitat loss and fragmentation is another important reason why tigers disappearing. Without a safe and healthy home for tigers and their prey, neither can survive in the wild. Humans are rapidly encroaching into wilderness areas that were once ruled exclusively by the tiger. In India, which is home to over one third of the world's wild tigers, the human population has exceeded one billion inhabitants.

As tigers compete with humans for land, they find less and less to eat. Local people hunt the same prey as tigers do, pressing tigers to resort to domestic animals and, on rarer occasions, even humans....

Read more [...]

PALM OIL: the bigger picture

PALM OIL PLANTATIONS, THE ILLUSION of SUSTAINABILTY…. Environmentalists see the establishment of oil palm plantations as a new threat to the world's largest rainforests and their biodiversity. The potential for palm oil plantations in the Brazilian Amazon is vast: the Woods Hole Research Center estimates that 2.283 million square kilometers (881,000 sq miles) of forest land in the region is suitable for oil palm, an area far greater in extent than that which could be converted for soy (390,000 sq km) or sugar cane (1.988 million sq km). Woods Hole calculates this area of forest locks up some 42.5 billion tons (gigatons) of carbon in aboveground biomass, or roughly six times 2006 global emissions... Read more [...]