Assessment of Factors Responsible for Forest Loss in Tropics
Abstract
The tropical forest harbors the most enriched and highly diverse ecosystem in the world. Presently, many natural, as well as human-induced activities, are causing a deliberating impact on the biodiversity of this forest. The loss of primary vegetation in these forests has imbalanced the natural cycle of the surrounding environment. Among natural drivers, floods, drought, hurricane, and biotic stresses like pathogen and pest attack, whereas several anthropogenic activities such as forest fire, grazing, land modification through agricultural activities, exploitation of trees for fuel-wood and timber purpose, illegal cutting of vegetation are altogether responsible for massive destruction and degradation of tropical forestry. Various awareness drives has halted the rate of deforestation in last three decades; however, during the same time period, the global area of tropical forest cover has reduced at an alarming rate. In order to restore the loss, there is an urgent need to focus on conservation strategies like habitat rehabilitation, preservation of rare and endangered tree species, application of the new scientific methodology, and most importantly the rehabilitation of barren and waste forestland to ensure the functioning of a forest ecosystem. This research highlights the present status of plant diversity and the main drivers of biodiversity loss in tropical forests.
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Introduction
Biodiversity plays a significant role in forest ecosystem functioning and ecosystem services. There exist an important relationship between forest biodiversity and multi-functionality, among ecosystem services. However, the quantitative and causal relationships among forest biodiversity and ecosystem services are not clearly understood (Brockerhoff et al., 2017). Many anthropogenic activities like biodiversity loss, land degradation, and climate change, led to forest modification yet the degree of forest loss is not properly quantified and mapped. According to a study, only 40.5% or 17.4 million km2 of forest exhibit a high level of landscape-level integrity and only 27% of this land area is under protected areas. In these protected areas, only 56% of forests represent a high level of landscape-level integrity. Therefore there is an urgent need to check deforestation and restore natural forests globally (Grantham et al., 2021). The natural processes and forest management should be combined together to control extinctions and restore species richness in degraded lands (Lugo et al., 1993). Changing climate, rise in temperature, and GHG emission has a great impact on tropical forest biodiversity (Pandey et al., 2016). The tropics have witnessed heavy habitat destruction which may cause amass extinction in the years ahead. According to a dataset estimation of species richness of 875 ecological samples, about 41% of the tree and animal species are absent from disturbed habitats, however, most of the samples still represent forests of some kind. The homogenization of local communities provides strength to disturbance as losses are partially balanced by gains in these forests (Alroy, 2017). In tropical forests, the rare plant species coexistence is facilitated by non-random spatial distributions or niche differences, understory plants, and impact of host-specific pests on reproductive adults (Janzen-Connell effects), whereas the established and abundant species are influenced by negative density (Wright,2002). In tropics, the plant diversification is mainly influenced by broad ecological settings as woody plants show contrasting differences in community ecological patterns, population genetic, biogeographic, and phylogenetic. These woody vegetation shows high β-diversity among separate areas of forests, as these areas contain monophyletic clades of endemic plant species with geographically structured intraspecific genetic variations that are geologically old (Pennington et al., 2009). Major terrestrial biomes like tropical rainforests are biologically enriched and most of their diversity is still unidentified. The traditional and molecular methods help in providing basic information for studying both the origin and management of plant diversity in tropical forests. Modern tools like DNA diagnostic tools, multilocus genomic markers, and plastid “DNA barcodes” can be successfully applied in the taxonomic discovery of tropical forest plots (Dick & Kress., 2009). In the coming years the functional diversity, distribution, and dynamics of tropical trees can be properly addressed using functional genomics (Swenson et al., 2012). A sampling of rare tropical trees is more challenging due to extensive cryptic diversity. The integration of geography, morphology, and genomics, is abetter option for estimation of the species which helps in understanding the origins of diversity and making ease the conservation efforts (Federman et al., 2018). Some of the dimensions of plant diversity like structural, functional, and, taxonomic, showa significant relationship with timber and non-timber forest product (NTFP) services. The richness of tree species in tropics is positively correlated with carbon stocks and as the geographical extent increases there exist a negative correlation with the bonding of this relationship. There should be a strong strategic policy designing on conservation of biodiversity and carbon stocks maintenance at local to regional spatial scales (Steur et al., 2012). The use of a similar technique with some geometric modifications and image mosaicking helps in identifying land cover data and can provide information on forests, plantations, agriculture, non-vegetated, and other land use categories. It also helps in estimating the magnitude of changes in forest cover and assessing of causes of these changes overtime (Wijayaa et al., 2015).
Human-induced land modification in the tropics has significantly shown a wide impact on biodiversity and people. Poverty, corruption, environmental apathy, poor natural resource governance, and lack of conservation funding are some of the major challenges in front of conservation biologists. Thus the biologist, civil society, lawyers, social scientists, funding agencies, governments and non-governmental organizations, national and multinational corporations should come forward not only to understand but also to save biodiversity (Sodhi, 2008). In tropical deciduous forests, the rapid inventory information about baseline data of tree species diversity and structure helps in the management of protected areas. This along within situ methods has the potential in facilitating the conservation of natural forests (Naidu et al., 2018). The forest conservation model requires extensive testing in all forest biomes and geographical regions before implementation (Pandey et al., 2015). The study of the relationship between tree species composition, richness, and carbon stock of tropical dry forest need special attention as it helps in monitoring, predicting, and finding solutions for the management of these ecosystems, often vulnerable to anthropogenic activities. Fine-scale inventory data of tree species has the potentiality in designing predictive models for the effective management of these forests (Sainge et al., 2020).
Conclusion
In conclusion, the loss of tropical wilderness will cause an adverse impact on the natural cycling of environmental components and directly affect the ecosystem functioning of major biomes of the globe. The monitoring of forest area loss using satellite data is urgently required followed by implementing control measures. The weakness in government policies to prevent illegal cutting and trafficking of timber and forest produce should be properly addressed. In situ conservation, conserving keystone species, human population settlement, and other such types of strategies will prevent the loss of valuable species of the tropical forests.