The Key Biodiversity Areas Programme Must Do Better for Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities goodmenproject.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from goodmenproject.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Ecologists and environmental advocates on Thursday called for swift action to reintroduce species into the wild as scientists at the University of Cambridge in England found that 97% of the planet's land area no longer qualifies as ecologically intact.
Rewilding can help heal wounds we ve inflicted on nature nowtoronto.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from nowtoronto.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Published July 1, 2021, 10:30 AM
The majority of the Earth’s lands are facing a loss of ecological integrity.
Ecological integrity, or the capacity of an ecosystem to naturally protect all the organisms and habitats, can be assessed in three measures of intactness. These are habitat intactness, faunal intactness, and functional intactness.
Image by jplenio from Pixabay.
Habitat intactness is determined by how humans have created changes to the land, while faunal intactness pertains to the set of animal species in a habitat, and functional intactness shows if there is an adequate number of animals that make an ecosystem work.
Andrew Plumptre, the head of the Key Biodiversity Areas Secretariat in the UK, says that only two to three percent of the land on Earth remains the same state, having the same flora and fauna since the pre-industrial times or before major human activities took place.
Species or Ecosystems: How Best to Restore the Natural World?
What’s the best way to protect nature and restore what has been lost? A series of new scientific papers offer conflicting views on whether efforts should focus on individual species or ecosystems and point to the role human inhabitants can play in conserving landscapes.
The Serengeti plain of East Africa is one of the world’s great wild lands teeming with lions, leopards and migrating wildebeest. But is it ecologically intact, a rare fragment of the earth unaltered by the hand of humanity? Or is it, as many researchers argue, a human-created landscape, nurtured by generations of Maasai cattle herders?