Extinction looms in Brazil's other big forest
By Andy Coghlan THE ongoing degradation of the Amazon rainforest has obscured the plight of its smaller sibling: the Atlantic forest in Brazil, which is a biodiversity hotspot. Once covering about 1.5 million square kilometres, the rainforest has been reduced to about one-tenth of its original area in the past 500 years, a new study has shown.
The Atlantic forest supports more than 20,000 species of plants, 260 mammals, 700 birds, 200 reptiles, 280 amphibians and hundreds of unnamed species. Unless the damage is halted, monkeys and birds unique to the region will go extinct, including iconic species such as the golden lion tamarin (Leontopithecus rosalia) and the northern woolly spider monkey (Brachyteles hypoxanthus), both among the most endangered of all the world’s monkeys. “Unfortunately, the forest is in very bad shape,” says Jean Paul Metzger at the University of São Paulo in Brazil. “Species extinctions will occur more rapidly and, since 30 per cent of the species are endemic to the region, they will disappear forever.” The desperate state of the forest became clear when Metzger’s colleague Milton Cezar Ribeiro mapped the entire region in great detail using satellite images, combined with vegetation maps produced by the SOS Mata Atlantica Foundation, a charity campaigning to save the forest. Ribeiro found that of the remaining forest, about 80 per cent is split into fragments of less than 0.5 square kilometres. The average distance between these fragments is 1.4 kilometres, making it difficult for animals to move from one part of the forest to another (Biological Conservation, vol 142, p 1141). …
