Although parks, reserves and strengthening indigenous land rights have helped protect trees, these measures are nowhere near enough, the authors warn.
Advertisement
But until now, scientists knew little about how deforestation affected individual species.
“We’re just offering a new estimate of how tree species have been affected by historical deforestation, and how they’ll be affected by forest loss in the future”, Pitman said.
It’s been estimated that the Amazon rainforest and surrounding areas are-or once were-home to upwards of 11,000 different tree species.
These findings has implications on tropical forests around the globe, meaning more than 40,000 tropical tree species could qualify as globally threatened species. Furthermore, a few of the tree plot data was collected through the Museum’s rapid inventory program, in which ecologists, biologists, and anthropologists travel to the Amazon and take stock of the plants, animals, and people who live there. Fortunately, study leader Hans ter Steege of Naturalis Biodiversity Center (of the Netherlands) comments that Amazon parks, reserves, and indigenous territories will, if properly managed from here on out, protect most of the threatened species.
Killeen said current estimates showed that the Amazon was doing better than the researchers’ best-case scenario had predicted, for which the team credits recent efforts to expand parks and protected areas.
Until now, there has been no reliable estimate of how bad the extinction threatened the tree species of the Amazon.
These endangered tree species yield economically crucial food crops such as heart of palm, Brazil nut, açaí fruit and timber as well, adding to more than 700 species that are greatly depended upon by residents of the Amazon for medicine, fruits, thatch, latex and essential oils. The authors caution that Amazonian forests and reserves still face a barrage of threats, from dam construction and mining to wildfires and droughts intensified by global warming, and direct invasions of indigenous lands. Most parks and reserves in Brazil have no long-term management plans or budgets, researchers point out.
“It’s a battle we’re going to see play out in our lifetimes”, explained, a researcher and conservationist with University in Australia.
The scientists emphasize that their results are too preliminary to constitute a formal red list for Amazonian trees.
Advertisement
Under the “business as usual” model, 8690 of today’s tree species should be classified as threatened and, under the second model, 5515 should be, the team reported.
