The Rainforest. An Introduction.

Rainforests? I'm a big fan, I think they're great and significantly, I think they're important. But, it's not just me that thinks they're important - it's actually just a fact. Planet earth's tropical rainforests take up less than 5% of the world's surface area, yet it is estimated that they still hold around 50% of all earth's flora and fauna. They're pretty diverse to say the least - in fact, they're extremely BIOdiverse. According to the Convention on Biological Diversity, biodiversity means:

'The variability among living organisms from all sources including, inter alia, terrestrial, marine and other aquatic ecosystems and the ecological complexes of which they are part; this includes diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems.'

Rainforests, in today's current climate (both environmentally and politically), are vulnerable. As mentioned above, rainforests as ecosystems are extremely biodiverse, and not only that, but they provide extremely important ecosystem services that are vital for the survival of the human race. The world's rainforests, their locations highlighted on the map below, provide services such as fuel wood, stabilisation of soils protecting from soil erosion and regulate the global climate by reducing greenhouse gas concentrations.

Map displaying locations of the world's rainforests

The over-extraction and over-exploitation of rainforests that we see today is paradoxically self-destructive. There is a strong body of scientific research that recognises how the loss to ecosystem services reduces the resilience of the human race (Hooper et al., 2005). The diagram below, taken from the European Commission's paper on the 2020 EU biodiversity strategy, clearly illustrates the reciprocal nature of the relationship between protecting biodiversity in ecosystems (i.e. rainforests) and human well-being.

Through the following  posts on this blog, I hope to explore the current state of our world's tropical rainforests and fully understand exactly how important they are and to what extent, through our actions, we as humans are jeopardising our own futures. To end this short introductory post, below are some pictures I've taken when visiting a part of the most amazing Costa Rican rainforest. The month I spent living in Tortuguero National Park helped me start to appreciate just how vital rainforests are to planet earth (hence the choice of topic for my blog was an obvious and easy one). Perhaps looking at the photos below you might think I am a part of the problem that I've been describing above... and that's definitely something I've considered - hmm!