Hey! Where is my home?

Deforestation.



Over the past 10,000 year, human activities such as urbanization, industrialization, and agriculture have shaped up the surface of the earth. Human have transformed billions of hectares of former forests and grasslands to cities, roads, houses, and other uses. Our actions have certainly caused the loss of wildlife habitat.



Globally, around 13 million hectares (ha) of forests were converted to other uses (including agriculture) or were lost through natural causes each year between 2000 and 2010. Primary forests account for 36 per cent (1.4 billion ha) of the world's forest area but their area has decreased by more than 40 million ha — at a rate of 0.4 per cent annually — over the last ten years. South America accounted for the largest proportion of the loss in primary forests, followed by Africa and Asia. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nation. 2011. Forest biodiversity at risk. http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/45904/icode/



Why is it forest important to wildlife? Forest is important because it provides place and food for wildlife to survive. Forest play an important role as a producer in the food chain, primary consumer such as deer depend on plant as their food and secondary consumer such as tigers depend on deer for food. For this food chain, we can identify the food chain as a set of interacting species in certain area known as ecosystem community. Let’s say we have removed one of the community such as plant from the food chain, this will affect the other community such as deer because insufficient food which is plant has reduced the number of deer and due to the insufficient food that is deer, the secondary consumer, tigers also suffer from hunger because they depend on primary consumer as food.



As a result, the ecosystem of the forest becomes imbalance and the population of wildlife is at risk! For example, John Seidensticker of the Save the Tiger Fund Council says humans continue to encroach upon reserves to grow coffee and to poach, and the reserves have not protected the tiger. The number of Sumatran tigers is estimated at about 500, and tiger-human conflict remains rife. In other word, human activities- agriculture such as coffee has reduced the habitat of Sumatera tiger. For more information, you may refer to:

http://dsc.discovery.com/convergence/tigers/plight/slide_05.html



So who is going to be responsible for this? We as humans are responsible for this because we have cut down the tree for urban developing, industrial developing and others.