The SIxth Extinction Chapter 9 - Elyonni Tordesillas

       In Brazil, near the Venezuelan border, there is a square-shaped area known as Reserve 1202. Reserve 1202 consists of 25 acres of untouched rainforest, and all around it there is “scrub” (the remains of rainforest areas where the trees were cut down). There are many other similar Reserves in the area, all controlled by the Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project, an organization founded in the 1970s by Tom Lovejoy. Lovejoy wanted a way to protect certain rainforest areas from farmers and ranchers cutting down trees. He presented a plan to the Brazilian government, and ever since then he has been given grants to study the rainforest preserves. Lovejoy’s research involves making comparisons between the tiny reserves and the main rainforest area, miles away. The purpose of Tom Lovejoy’s organization is to isolate small patches of rainforest and measure the biodiversity there, in order to give science a better idea of what will happen in the future, when the entire rainforest has been reduced to a few 25-acre patches. Kolbert goes to Reserve 1202 with an ornithologist named Mario Cohn-Haft. Cohn-Haft takes Kolbert out into the forest late at night to listen to bird-calls. He explains that, over the course of his many years at Reserve 1202, he’s noticed a gradual decline in the diversity of bird species, and in biodiversity overall. Cohn-Haft’s observations support a possibility that Kolbert suggested in the previous chapter. The decline in available land area will cause a marked decline in observed biodiversity, both for birds and in general.