Question

what is the effects of deforestation

Answer 1

Effect of deforestation

The United States Environmental Protection Agency defines deforestation as the "permanent removal of standing forests." The removal, however, occurs for a variety of different reasons and has a variety of devastating consequences.

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Answer 2

Answer:

Deforestation has important global consequences. Forests sequester carbon in the form of wood and other biomass as the trees grow, taking up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (see carbon cycle). When forests are burned, their carbon is returned to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that has the potential to alter global climate (see greenhouse effect; global warming), and the trees are no longer present to sequester more carbon.In addition, most of the planet’s valuable biodiversity is within forests, particularly tropical ones. Moist tropical forests such as the Amazon have the greatest concentrations of animal and plant species of any terrestrial ecosystem; perhaps two-thirds of Earth’s species live only in these forests. As deforestation proceeds, it has the potential to cause the extinction of increasing numbers of these species.

On a more local scale, the effects of forest clearing, selective logging, and fires interact. Selective logging increases the flammability of the forest because it converts a closed, wetter forest into a more open, drier one. This leaves the forest vulnerable to the accidental movement of fires from cleared adjacent agricultural lands and to the killing effects of natural droughts. As wildfires, logging, and droughts continue, the forest can become progressively more open until all the trees are lost. Additionally, the burning of tropical forests is generally a seasonal phenomenon and can severely impact air quality. Record-breaking levels of air pollution have occurred in Southeast Asia as the result of burning for oil palm plantations.In the tropics, much of the deforested land exists in the form of steep mountain hillsides. The combination of steep slopes, high rainfall, and the lack of tree roots to bind the soil can lead to disastrous landslides that destroy fields, homes, and human lives. With the significant exception of the forests destroyed for the oil palm industry, many of the humid forests that have been cleared are soon abandoned as croplands or only used for low-density grazing because the soils are extremely poor in nutrients. (To clear forests, the vegetation that contains most of the nutrients is often burned, and the nutrients literally “go up in smoke” or are washed away in the next rain.)