Research shows that biodiversity damage in the tropics can be even worse than expected if we are not serious about solving environmental problems there.
An international research team is inventorying biodiversity in the tropics including forests, grasslands, freshwater areas, and coastlines.
The result: although the tropics only cover about 40 percent of the earth's surface, it is home to 78 percent of plant and animal species, including amphibians, terrestrial mammals, fish, ants and flowering plants in the world.
The role of the tropics is even more important for birds because 91 percent of land birds live in warm and humid zones. Other bird species also stop by and visit the tropics in their annual migration.
In addition, the tropics are also home to almost all corals in shallow water. Most tropical species are not found anywhere else, and researchers estimate there are at least 150,000 species that are not yet known to scientists.
Deforestation, pollution, overfishing and hunting, invasion of alien species and global warming greatly affect tropical ecosystems. This loss of ecosystems has dramatic negative effects on humans.
One of the main hypotheses is that species are much more diverse in the tropics than cooler regions - where diversification in this context is the difference between the emergence of new species and their extinction rate. However, a recent publication states that there is no link between the level of diversity and the height of the region, meaning that according to this study diversification between the tropics and cooler regions does not occur.
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the rate of the exticntion of the tropical islands https://brainly.com/question/9671997
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Grade: High School
Subject: Biology
keywords: Rate, island, extinction.
