The world's vanishing wild places are vital for saving species

Laurance, Bill

Abstract

[Extract] In science, it's rare that a new idea comes along that stops people in their tracks. For ecologists, this has just happened, in a paper that found that species living in wild places have more genetic diversity than the same species living in areas dominated by people. Why is this big news? For starters, it's a completely new reason to worry about the decline of wilderness. My colleagues and I showed recently that wilderness areas have shrunk by a tenth globally in just the past two decades. Large wild areas are now mostly confined to cold, dry or otherwise inhospitable parts of the planet such as the far north and big deserts. Biologically rich rainforests have been destroyed the fastest.

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The Conversation

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12 October 2016

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The Conversation Media Group

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