Deforestation shrinks animal habitat

Deforestation shrinks animal habitat

TANJUNG PUTING, Central Kalimantan (JP): From the window of
the noisy twin-propeller plane, the most striking feature of the
land below was not the legendary virgin forests of Kalimantan,
but the lack of them.

The Central Kalimantan landscape revealed nearly organized
rubber and palm plantations and the scruffy underbrush of forest
that had already sacrificed its canopy to the timber industry.

With the loss of these trees disappears the home of the
orangutan, Asia's red-haired great ape, and with him much of the
biodiversity of one of the largest regions of rain forest in the
world.

Tanjung Puting says that the size of orangutan habitat in
Indonesia and Malaysia has declined by 80 percent over the last
two decades, and that there are one-third to one-half as many
orangutans as there were a decade ago.

Overall estimates on deforestation across Kalimantan are hard
to find, but no one claims that the rate of cutting for timber or
agricultural conversion is slowing.

Although the timber industry logs selectively and only cuts
the largest trees, said Willie Smits, director of the Warnariset
Forest orangutan rehabilitation center in East Kalimantan, those
projects open up the forest to new settlement and increase
contact between humans and animals.

Even now, one million hectares of land in Central Kalimantan
are being converted by presidential decree for rice cultivation.
While this project will feed and employ a new batch of
transmigrants, it is expected to displace 3,000 to 5,000
orangutans.

"It's not only orangutans. They're only the acceptable faces
of conservation, charismatic metovertebrae," said Ron Lilley,
species conservation officer at World Wide Fund for Nature.

Orangutans are a symbol, the lively logo of an endangered
species campaign, but their disappearance is also a bellwether of
those who live in the forest beneath them.

In the wild, orangutans need a one-half kilometer square to
roam and find adequate food sources. If the orangutan dies
because that square of land disappears, wildlife biologists
assume that other species which need a smaller range to live have
disappeared as well.

The rain forest ecosystem is not uniform, so a one-half
kilometer area may have been the only home of a species.
Depending on how far one goes down the life chain, and based on
whether one considers not only mammals, but reptiles, fish,
birds, plants, insects and bacteria, the number of disappearing
species within the domain of one orangutan could reach millions.

Many of these species have not even been named. Beyond the
intrinsic value of a species, humans do not know the role of
these species in perpetuating the rain forest ecosystem or their
potential medicinal value.

In contrast, if that orangutan and its half kilometer of
forest is protected, "you can say that hundreds of thousands, or
even millions, of species have been saved," said Lilly. (Becky
Mowbray)