Amazon Rainforest Research Paper

559 Words2 Pages

The Amazon Rainforest is a home to more than 40,000 types of plant species, 3,000 freshwater fish species, and more than 370 types of reptiles. The Amazon is also described as “Lungs of our Planet” because it provides us with more than 20% of the world’s oxygen, but today this substantial rainforest is being threatened. Just like many other rainforests, the Amazon is currently facing many threats and it is affecting society in various negative ways. The Amazon is located in South America. It is also a home to more than 30 million people. Every year there is about 80 in of rain. The temperature in the rainforest is usually between seventy and eighty-five degrees Fahrenheit. The Amazon contains the longest river in the world known as the Amazon River. The rainforest contains about 3000 fruit. Only 200 hundred are of these fruits are being used in the Western World, and the Natives use about 2,000 of it. The Amazon is fifty percent of all tropical rainforest on Earth. In some places in the rainforest, the branches and leaves …show more content…

The Amazon forest faces threats like climate change, cattle ranching and agricultural expansion, badly planned infrastructure, illegal logging, oil exploration, gold mining, overharvesting of fish or other water species, commercial fishing, biopiracy and smuggling, poaching, and lastly damming. Eighty percent of cut down forest areas in the Amazon are cattle. Runoff from pastures pollutes rivers. Fires used to control fields often spread into the remaining forest. The people that commercial fish usually lose up to sixty percent of the fish due to spoilage. 232,000 square miles of Amazon has been destroyed due to logging. In the Amazon about sixty to eighty percent of logging is done illegally. Rainforests used to cover about fourteen percent of earth surface but now it is only six percent. If we don’t stop all these threats in about forty years there won’t be any rainforests at

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