Linking Journalism with the Web of Life
Last year I brought you the story of Lambir Hills National Park, a Bornean forest in which I used to live and work, where hunting and other pressures have forced into extinction much of the biggest wildlife species (see The near empty forest that proves conservation is failing).
It describes how recent surveys had failed to find 20 percent of the park’s resident bird species and 22 percent of its mammal species. The forest is emptying fast. The losses include half of the park’s primate species and six out of seven hornbill species – all important dispersers of rainforest seeds. Sun bears and gibbons, bearded pigs and flying foxes all once called Lambir Hills home. Today it is hard to find an animal that weighs more than a kilogram in the national park.
Now researchers have shown what these extinctions mean for the forest itself. Rhett Harrison and colleagues tracked the fates of over 470,000 trees of more than 1,100 species for a 15-year period since intense hunting began there.
Read what they found out here…
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