Environment Climate Crisis Nature. Society Rights Politics. Gender Activism Coronavirus. Home Lifestyle 10 nature reserves you should visit at least once in your life. Forests 10 nature reserves you should visit at least once in your life. Forests Oceans Travel. Lewa Wildlife Conservancy. Related articles. Forests 20 march by Editorial Staff.
Whales are starving to death due to rising ocean temperatures. Oceans 8 february by Elisabetta Scuri. Oceans 8 january by Valentina Neri. Oceans 19 august Japan leads the way in accessible tourism. From ancient aboriginal rock-art sites, to the buildings left over from early European settlements, our national parks serve as a natural history book dating back thousands of years.
Our national parks protect these vital and fragile places; areas where the traces of a history extending back more than 22, years can remain undisturbed. Today our protected areas are still used by Aboriginal people in a number of ways, such as a source of food, tools, medicine and trade, as well as in ceremonial and spiritual activities. In this way national parks provide an opportunity in for people to establish and continue their connections with the land and to share their irreplaceable cultural knowledge with the wider community.
Natural areas have a profound effect on our physical and emotional health and wellbeing. The affected species include plants with differing growth forms and life-history strategies and animals that vary greatly in body size, diet, foraging strategies, area needs, habitat use and other attributes. One factor that jumps out is that reserves that have seen improvements over time in actual, on-the-ground protection fare better.
Investments in park guards, infrastructure and vehicles have big benefits for reserves. We found that threats immediately outside reserves were nearly as important as those inside in determining their biological health.
This surprised us at first, but then we recalled just how quickly the environments surrounding many tropical nature reserves are changing. An example is Ducke Reserve, a 10,hectare park originally on the outskirts of the Amazonian city of Manaus, Brazil. As the city has grown, urban sprawl has swallowed the reserve like a giant amoeba.
Instead of being embedded in forest, Ducke today is encircled by a hostile sea of houses, traffic, feral dogs and air and water pollution. Human populations have grown sharply near many protected areas, ratcheting up environmental pressures.
In some places, farmers and loggers are marching right up to the borders of reserves. This is bad news for parks. Isolated habitats tend to lose species whose small, fragmented populations are cut off from life-giving immigration and gene flow. Others, such as large-bodied animals and predators, are hunted or persecuted if they stray beyond the margins of reserves.
The forests surrounding many protected areas are being rapidly cleared or degraded. Shown is recent deforestation for oil palm plantations along the edge of Bukit Palong National Park in Peninsular Malaysia. Equally insidious is that the changes outside protected areas tend to penetrate inside them. For instance, a reserve encircled by logging, mining and poaching will also tend to suffer those same threats, to a lesser degree, inside the reserve itself.
Protected areas are like mirrors; reflecting, to a degree, the health of their immediate surroundings. To strengthen our resilience to climate change. Protected areas help to mitigate extreme weather events, enhance carbon storage, and provide space for plants and animals to adapt to a changing climate. To maintain functioning ecosystems and the benefits they provide. To improve our overall health and well-being through contact with nature. Protected areas provide employment opportunities and contribute billions of dollars to the Canadian economy every year.
Protected areas are gateways to the landscapes that have sustained, inspired and defined us who share this land we call Canada. To build knowledge and understanding of natural systems and the impacts of human activity. Protected areas serve as environmental benchmarks for monitoring the health of natural systems and understanding the effects of climate change, pollution, resource extraction, invasive species and other stressors. A representative system of protected areas that helps to preserve diverse gene pools can maintain future options for research and adaptation in the face of environmental change.
Learn more about our Protected Places program. Your support makes all the difference. Please consider making a gift to help permanently protect iconic wild spaces across Ontario. A ton of people might assume that wildlife parks are just left alone to the animals.
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