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A third of the planet’s land is severely degraded. Each year, we lose 15 billion trees and 24 billion tonnes of fertile soil. Juliana Schatz travels to the Cerro Blanco Dry Forest in Ecuador. A unique 6000 acres dry forest habitat home to a bounty of unique wildlife, almost half of it sits within the city limits of Guayaquil, with a population over 2 million and rapidly expanding.
The forest has been under a successful reforestation program over the last 20 years however, with slums and townships growing around the forest edge, the forest is becoming increasingly under threat once again from a range of human based activities, such as poaching and logging.To help the rangers in their work, the local government has teamed up with rainforest connection, a San Francisco based tech startup, who are producing a unique solar powered tree-top listening device that can be calibrated to pick up and alert the authorities of any illegal activity.
Here the device is being adapted further to help the conservation programs that are also occurring around the forest, such as monitoring the critically endangered great green macaw, which has recently been re-introduced. Australia is one of the most biodiverse countries in the world, and is home to one of the oldest human cultures on earth - Australia’s Aboriginal people. But Australia’s unique ecosystems are under threat from climate change, fossil fuel extraction, mega fires and invasive species, and indigenous knowledge of the country’s vast bushlands is diminishing through modernisation. Australia’s pioneering Indigenous Protected Areas (IPAs) and Indigenous Ranger programs bring together traditional indigenous knowledge and modern science to look after Australia’s biodiversity.
There are now over 100 indigenous ranger groups across the country, protecting over 63m hectares of land in partnership with the government. Activities include controlled burns, managing invasive species, protecting endangered wildlife and mapping and cleaning water bodies. Rachael Hocking meets the Martu Rangers, in Western Australia.