Dans Mongabay
Madagascar’s total forest cover fell by 40 percent in the second half of the 20th century, but fragmentation of the forests that remained progressed even more quickly. (..) “The tragedy of Madagascar is that the forest there is in pieces,” said Stuart Pimm, an expert on the biology of fragmentation and extinction.. Some of Madagascar’s most fragmented ecosystems are also among the most critical to global biodiversity. Madagascar’s evergreen littoral forests grew up on old sand dunes and once stretched in an unbroken band two or more miles thick along the whole of the island’s 1,000-mile long east coast. Today, Birkinshaw said, “Most of that vegetation type is gone: there’s no fragment now which is bigger than 2,000 hectares.” Still, researchers estimate the remaining fragments of evergreen littoral forest contain 13 percent of the island’s plant species on less than 1 percent of its land. (..) In 2000, an MBG (Missouri Botanical Garden) review of priorities for plant conservation around the island produced a list of 78 sites. Today, half of the 78 have been integrated into existing or new protected areas, including the 12 sites managed by MBG. The other half remain without environmental protection, and at least one has been destroyed. Some are quite large — MBG’s largest site is over 75,000 hectares — but each of these areas, particularly the smallest, like Ankafobe, serves as a kind of natural history museum.
This is the third part of Mongabay’s multi-part series “Conservation in Madagascar” being published during the fall of 2017. The entire series will be collected here.
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