AMAZON

At least 50% of rainforests are made up of animals. They are being cut down at the rate of one football field per second, so a lot of animals will be left without a home since they depend on the plants. Rainforests are about 2% of the earth, and 7% of just the land. The tallest layer in the rainforest could be 150 feet high. There are at least 1,400 different tropical plants that have ability to fight againstcancer. In four square miles, there are about 1,800 flowering plants, 750 trees, 125 mammals, and 150 butterfly species. There are four layers in rainforests: the canopy the understory, the underbrush, and the ground. The canopy can be from 60 to 150 feet tall, with branches that fan out like an umbrella that is really close together. Because of this, it blocks the sunlight from the lower plants on the ground level, but also blocks it from rain falling directly on them, and instead, running down the trunks and dripping off the leaves. The vines (lianas) are as thick as a person and climb up the trees for sunlight. In temperate rainforests, there are the following vegetation: bananas, avocados, pineapples, peppers, peanuts, oranges, papayas, lemons, cinnamon, spices, coconut, and sugar. Curare is used as an anesthetic and to relax people for surgery. Quinine from a cinchona tree is used to treat malaria. Rosy Periwinkle has a drug in it that is anti-lukemia and gives patients 99% chance to get the drug in vemision. Epiphyts grow canpoy trees, as well as moss, orchid.

Amazon Rainforests:

In the Amazon rainforests 1,600 species of birds and about 1,000,000,000 species of insects. There are five times more bird species in the Amazon. The oil of the cocoa is used in suntan lotions, cosmetics, and soap. They also grow rubber trees that produce latex for making tires. Kapok trees have silky waterproof fibers used for life preservers, pillows, upholstery, and installation. If 1 Hectacre. = 2.471 Acres, that means that Brazil has over 93 million acres of protected forests and parks!

forFires set by people will be the biggest threat to the Amazon rainforest in coming decades linked to a drier climate caused by global warming. "Fire associated with human activity and drying is likely to be what eliminates the forest rather than the gradual stress of climate change," Mark Bush of the Florida Institute of Technology and U.S.-based colleagues wrote in a study.

Examining the history of fire in Amazonia, they said people were the overwhelming cause of burning in the past 3,000 years with lightning strikes rarely igniting the wet forest. "The Amazon doesn't burn unless people burn it," Bush told Reuters.

A drier climate, more human settlements and burning to clear land for farming would bring risks of ever wider fire damage, they wrote in the British journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B devoted to the Amazon.

Indigenous people in the Amazon basin before Christopher Columbus sailed the Atlantic in 1492 "burned the forest to clear it for agriculture, and perhaps also to improve hunting," they wrote of charcoal records. "After the time of European contact, fires became much scarcer."

The U.N. Climate Panel predicted in a 2007 report that rising temperatures and drier soil would "lead to gradual replacement of tropical forest by savannah in eastern Amazonia" by 2050.

It also said there was a risk of a "significant" loss of the diversity of species of animals and plants because climate change could drive many to extinction. Its models did not assess fire risks.

"Fire is the greatest climate-linked threat to the Amazon forest," a team led by Jos Barlow ofLancaster University in England wrote in the same journal, adding that the ability of the forest to regrow after fires may have been repeated.

"Episodic fires can lead to drastic changes in forest structure and composition," the said.

But they said there was some hope because farming practices could be changed to avoid burning. Fire is "one of the few aspects of climate change mitigation over which we retain some direct control," they said.

Deforestation -- mainly from burning tropical forests -- is widely considered to contribute about 20 percent of world greenhouse gas emissions. Trees soak up heat-trapping carbon dioxide as they grow and release it when they burn or rot.

A study led by the University of Leeds said trees and creepers in intact parts of the Amazon forest grew faster in the 1980s and 1990s -- apparently spurred by climate change -- and so helped to brake the overall warming.

They cautioned that "this subsidy from nature is now at risk from drought, biodiversity changes, deforestation and climate change itself.

The rainforests - with the Amazon by far the largest - are the planet's air conditioner. They suck up millions of tons of greenhouse gases and store them safely out of the atmosphere. But, as we hack them down, they are releasing these warming gases. Soon, we will reach a point where there is so much carbon in the atmosphere that the system will pack in and stop extracting anything at all.

The fragile Amazon ecosystem is trapped today in a pincer movement: it is simultaneously being cut down and heated up. Let's start with the cutting. Logging by vast agribusinesses has increased to clear space to produce products for Europe and the United States. The biggest slash-and-burn growth industry in Amazonia today is soya production - half of which is shipped to Europe to feed the animals we are going to milk and eat.

Logging is also carried out for a range of other rich-world wants. There are currently no legal restrictions in Britain or the US on selling illegal timber pillaged from the Amazon.

And logging doesn't only trash the trees it chops down and ships off; it also makes the trees it leaves behind much more vulnerable to fire. Until a few decades ago, scientists thought it was impossible for such humid tropical rainforests to burn. But it turns out chopping down trees breaks the dense carapace of leaves that covers the forest, allowing sunlight to break through. This dries out the leaf litter that lies on the floor - turning it into tinder.
So how do you and I stop being part of the problem, and become part of the solution?