About this site
Providing tropical forest news, statistics, photos, and information, rainforests.mongabay.com is the world's most popular rainforest site. [more]
POPULATION DIVERSITY
There is increasing emphasis on the importance of species populations, not species as a whole, in the evolutionary
process. Every species is made up of genetically or geographically distinct populations. Over time these populations
can diverge from each other, in specializing to a particular niche, and new sub-species and species can be formed.
A recent paper calculated that each species on average has 220 populations, giving a total of 1.1 to 6.6 billion
populations worldwide (assuming 5-30 million species on Earth). However, these populations are even more subject
to extinction than entire species because of their localities and small number of members. It is estimated that
in tropical forests alone, 1800 distinct populations are lost every hour, a rate of 16 million annually.
"Rainforest" is used interchangeably with "rain forest" on this site. Same for "rainforests" and "rain forests". "Jungle" is generally not used.
Recent news
Amazon deforestation rate falls to lowest on record (8/10/2007) Deforestation rates in the Brazilian Amazon for the previous year were the lowest on record, according to preliminary figures released by INPE, Brazil's National Institute of Space Research.
Lowland rainforest less diverse than previously thought (8/9/2007) While rainforests are the world's libraries of biodiversity, species richness may be more evenly distributed in some forests than in others, reports an extensive new study by an international team of entomologists and botanists. The work, published in the current issue of the journal Nature, has important implications for forest management and conservation strategies.
Experts: parks effectively protect rainforest in Peru (8/9/2007) High-resolution satellite monitoring of the Amazon rainforest in Peru shows that land-use and conservation policies have had a measurable impact on deforestation rates. The research is published in the August 9, 2007, on-line edition of Science Express.
