“If you can imagine walking into a huge, 1,000-kilometer square [386-square-mile] tropical forest … it’s moist and damp [with] rich soil and an overstory. You imagine walking into a 10-meter [33-foot] patch of forest and it’s just a totally different thing. It’s drier, it’s more open, it’s more harsh, and there’ll be far fewer species,” says Thomas Crowther, ecology professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich). Fragmentation, the process by which large areas of intact forest become broken up into smaller pieces, is increasing in most of the world’s forests, according to a new Science study authored by Crowther and other researchers at institutions in Switzerland, Australia, China, the U.S. and the UK.   The study finds that more than 50% of the world’s forests became more fragmented between 2000 and 2020. Tropical forests fared the worst, with the findings indicating that up to 80% were fragmented over 20 years. This has profound implications for global biodiversity and ecosystem health, Crowther says. “[T]he scary thing is, even if we kept the same amount of forest area on the planet, if we’re turning those big intact ones into all the tiny fragments, we’re losing a lot of the ecological functionality.” Fragmentation can happen in different ways and for different reasons. Shifting cultivation can pockmark intact forests with clearings. New roads into previously intact areas can bring miners or loggers, creating a dendritic pattern of forest loss. Development can eat away at a forest’s perimeter. Stands of trees…This article was originally published on Mongabay

From Conservation news via this RSS feed