Shrinking Forests Can Devastate Wildlife

[Cara J]

Forests have shrunk about three percent globally since 1990, which can have devastating effects on the world’s biodiversity in plants and animals, according to the UN’s Global Forest Resources Assessment (GFRA) 2015. From 1990 to 2015, total forest area has declined from 4,128 million hectares to 3,999 million hectares according to the assessment, which involves an agreement of variables, definitions and standards between experts, followed by data collection and finally analysis and reporting about forest resources. “Different countries have different approaches to gathering information on forest resources,” said Rodney Keenan, a professor in the School of Ecosystem and Forest Sciences at the University of Melbourne and a member of the advisory groups to the UNFAO Global Forest Resource Assessment since 2003. Keenan has helped provide expert advice on the design and conduct of the survey since 2003 and for the 2015 assessment he led to group of experts in analyzing and producing a paper on the dynamics of global forest area. The assessment showed that tropical forests are subject to the greatest forest loss, and countries such as Brazil, Indonesia and parts of the Congo Basin in Africa have individually lost about 10 percent of their forests from 1990 to [...]

 

Read more: http://wildlife.org/shrinking-forests-can-devastate-wildlife/