Thursday, May 29, 2008
“My idea was to convey to the public that just as we talk about deforestation—a term that everybody understands and has a mental image of the meaning—to use an equivalent term, defaunation, to convey that there’s more than what we see with satellite imagery showing forest cover. What is missing from analyses of tropical forest conservation is the zoological impoverishment of forests due to human activities. You only see this impact when you continuously visit the forest on the ground and look at plants and analyze animal footprints and do animal transect surveys for year after year. Then you begin to see that, in addition to deforestation there is another serious problem in these ecosystems — the loss of the fauna, particularly the medium and large animals that are the most vulnerable because of hunting or habitat reduction or fragmentation… Defaunation is becoming a critical biodiversity conservation issue.” Rodolfo Dirzo, ecologist at Stanford University, in a fascinating interview with Rhett A. Butler of Mongabay.com. Dr. Dirzo, Butler writes, “says that the disappearance of wildlife due to overexploitation, fragmentation, and habitat degradation is causing ecological changes in some of the world’s most biodiverse tropical forests. He ranks defaunation — as he terms the ongoing biological impoverishment of forests — as one of the world’s most significant global changes, on par with environmental changes like global warming, deforestation, and shifts in the nitrogen cycle.” The interview is essential reading for understanding the crucial concept of shifting baselines and the “invisible” nature of species loss caused by human activity.
Posted at 6:37pm Tags: defaunation extinction Rodolfo Dirzo

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