Think Progress - Findings, published in the journal Science Advances, offer some of the longest-term evidence available on how ecosystems and species react to habitat loss and fragmentation over time. The trend is distinctively negative.
“There is a consistent loss of species — birds, butterflies, plants — across every experiment, and these experiments varied widely,” Nick M. Haddad, North Carolina State University biologist and lead author of the study on habitat fragmentation, told ThinkProgress. “But they were all going downward.”...
Bringing together numerous studies chronicling global habitat divisions over the last 35 years, Haddad and his co-authors found that only two “big blobs” of forest remain on Earth — in the Brazilian Amazon and the Congo Basin. They also found that some 70 percent of all remaining global forest cover is within one kilometer, or 0.6 miles, of human development.
“When we summed it all up, if you stand in any forest in any part of the world, there’s a one in five chance that you are within 100 meters — the length of a football field — of the end of the forest,” said Haddad. “And there’s a three-quarters chance that you are within a kilometer away. That’s just a few city blocks; I can see farther than that from my office.”
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