Amazon, Brazil
Endangered and rare species of the Amazon. This is something that everyone understands, and for the most part, this is the focus. If we move our focus on the Amazon region itself, we can expand our horizon and see the risks of an entire region. We risk losing not only some of the rarest species and also risk losing the last big forest in the world.
The danger is not just on the burning of the forest, the cattle, timber, minerals, and questionable dams. The climate change is now the biggest danger. But we will move our focus furthermore: on the beauty and harmony of the life with its incredible diversity of forms. We can discover the genialities of vegetative and animal strategies along with the unknown richness of the canopy.
We need to know what is in danger as well, as we like to appraise how the life flows in the Tropical Rain Forest.
To tell the story we shall stay in the wilderness as many times as we can, and remembering that the sentiment is the engine that governs in the Amazon. Feel the Amazon!
The Amazon River Basin highlight into the Earth biosphere and therefore, you wish to know more about it. Here are some of the most important things to know about the Amazon.
The Amazon River carries more water than any other river in the world. There is 20% of the fresh river water that flows into the oceans.
Is not the Nile, the longest river in the world? The Amazon River is considered the world’s largest river by volume, but scientists have believed it is slightly shorter than the Africa’s Nile River. A Brazilian scientists’ 14-day expedition extended the Amazon’s length by about 176 miles (284 kilometers), making it 65 miles (105 kilometers) longer than the Nile.
The Amazon River basin is about 4,195 miles long, covering about 2720,000 square miles in area, including its 15,000 tributaries and sub tributaries (four of which are in excess of 1,000 miles long). It is the largest river basin in the world.
The number of species of fish in the Amazon exceeds the number found in the entire Atlantic Ocean. These are amazing facts.
Due to the vast amount of water, as well as sediment, is deposited where the Amazon River meets the Atlantic Ocean. The color and salinity of the Atlantic Ocean are modified for nearly 200 miles (320 km) from the delta.
Some scientists have determined that the Amazon River flowed in the opposite direction, at one time or another, into the Pacific Ocean.
For much of its path, the Amazon River can be as much as one to six miles wide! During flood seasons, the Amazon River can be much, much wider. Some report it is more than 20 miles wide (32 km) in certain places.
The city at the heart of the basin, Manaus, has an altitude of only 144 feet. The average level of the basin is 300 feet above sea level.
There were an estimated ten million Indians living in the Amazonian Rainforest five centuries ago. Today there are less than 200,000.
Most of the cultured Medicine Men and Shamans remaining in the Rainforests today are 70 years old or more. Each time a Rainforest Medicine Man dies, it is as if a library has burned down.
The trees, of which 117 species have been counted in an area of one half of a square mile, are of enormous variety. The uppermost layer of the rainforest is called the canopy. It receives most of the light energy from the sun and is a zone of extreme profusion of life.
Experts estimate that we are losing 137 plants, animal and insect species, every single day due to rainforest deforestation. That equates to 50,000 species a year. As the rainforest species disappear, so do many possible cures for life-threatening diseases. Currently, 121 prescription drugs sold worldwide come from plant-derived sources. While 25% of Western pharmaceuticals are derived from rainforest ingredients, less than 1% of these tropical trees and plants have been tested by scientists.
Experts agree that by leaving the rainforests intact and harvesting its many nuts, fruits, oil-producing plants, along with the many medicinal plants, the rainforest has more economic value than if it were cut down to make grazing land for cattle or for timber.
At least 3000 fruits are found in the rainforests. Of these only 200 are now in use in the Western World. The Indians of the Rainforest use over 2,000.
Sufficient demand of sustainable and ecologically harvested rainforest products is necessary for preservation efforts to succeed. Purchasing sustainable rainforest products can effect positive change by creating a market for these products, while supporting the native people’s economy and which also provides the economic solution and alternative to cutting the forest down just for the value of its timber.
The biodiversity of the tropical rainforest is so immense that less than 1 percent of its’ millions of species have been studied by scientists for their active constituents and their possible uses. When an acre of rainforest is lost, their possible uses are staggering. Scientists estimate that we are losing more than 137 species of plants and animals every single day because of rainforest deforestation.
The Amazon rainforest contains the largest collection of living plant and animal species in the world. The diversity of plant species in the Amazon rainforest is the highest on Earth. It is estimated that a single hectare (2.47 acres) of the Amazon Rainforest contain about 900 tons of living plants, including more than 750 types of trees and 1500 other plants. The Andean Mountain range and the Amazon Jungle are home to more than half of the world’s species of flora and fauna. In fact, one in five of all the birds in the world live in the Rainforests of the Amazon. To date, some 438,000 species of plants of economic and social interest have been registered in the region, and many more have yet to be catalogued or even discovered.
If managed properly, the rainforest can provide the worlds’ needs for these natural resources, on a perpetual basis.
“The worst thing that can happen during the 1980’s is not energy depletion but the economic collapses, limited nuclear war, or conquests by a totalitarian government. As terrible as these catastrophes would be for us, they can be repaired within a few generations. The one process ongoing in the 1980’s that will take millions of years to correct, is the loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of the natural habitats.
“This is the folly that our descendants are least likely to forgive us for.” Harvard’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biologist Edward O. Wilson
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