By Bill Hathaway
April 29, 2021
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Tropical cloud forests exist in 60 countries but account for less than a half of 1% of all land mass on Earth. Yet they are home to 15% of the world’s known species, researchers estimate.
Despite enormous conservation efforts, including designation of vast areas of forest as protected areas, and their typically isolated location, as much as 8% of some forests have been lost in the past 20 years to environmental encroachments such as logging and small-scale farming, according to a new Yale-led study.
These encroachments severely threaten the survival of the nearly 2,000 species of mammals, amphibians, birds, and tree ferns that live exclusively in these forests, according to a paper published April 29 in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.
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