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Amazon Rainforest Research Paper

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The rainforest is an area of over two million square miles located around the Amazon river in South America, with average rainfalls that can exceed ten meters a year. The rainforest has the greatest amount of biodiversity of any area in the world. Over fifty percent of all animal and plant life on the planet can be found in the rainforest. Importantly, many of the medications and drugs that physicians use on a daily basis to treat patients are derived from plants found in the Amazon rainforest. Because of the sheer number of plants, over one-quarter of the oxygen on the earth is produced in the rainforest through photosynthesis. For these reasons and many others, the Amazon rainforest is extremely important to the health of our planet and ourselves. …show more content…

The greatest threat to the rainforest comes from human beings. Commercial logging or the cutting down of trees and other vegetation, for human use is the number one danger to the existence of the rainforest. Trees and lumber from rainforests are very valuable and loggers come from all over the world to cut down the trees in order to harvest lumber. Although this type of logging is regulated, there are many illegal or “wildcat” loggers who go into the rainforest at night or in the rain, cut down acres of trees, and leave without ever having been seen by the authorities. These illegal loggers use a process called “clear cutting”, where they cut down everything in sight. Because they do not replant the trees and plants that they destroy, if left unchecked, eventually these loggers would completely destroy the rainforest. Even if the areas they destroy are small, it changes the underlying ecosystem by letting in light and rain where darkness and relative dryness were

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