Word: ecosystems
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...much ancient forest is enough? The question is not just one of aesthetics or recreational adequacy. No one knows how much forest is needed to sustain an intricate and little understood ecosystem upon which animals and plants, and, yes, man too, depend. What is known is that the old growth plays an integral role in regulating water levels and quality, cleaning the air, enhancing the productivity of fisheries and enriching the stability and character of the soil. "We're probably just on the edge in terms of our understanding," says Eric Forsman, a biologist with the Forest Service...
...planet's oldest, deepest and largest lake, Baikal is about the size of Belgium and accounts for a fifth of the world's freshwater reserves. The threat to this unique ecosystem, home to more than 1,000 species of plants and animals unknown anywhere else, stimulated a vociferous Soviet environmental movement. Baikal, says Siberian activist Valentin Rasputin, contains "such pulchritude as to be unimaginable this side of paradise...
...coast of Belize is one of the seven underwater wonders of the world, a diver's paradise replete with about 45 kinds of coral and hundreds of species of fish. But by the mid-1980s, fishermen, shell collectors, tourists, construction and pollution were endangering the reef's fragile ecosystem. Today, thanks to a two-year-long campaign headed by Janet Patricia Gibson, 37, a Belizean botanist and zoologist, 13 sq. km (5 sq. mi.) of the reef have been set aside as the Hol Chan (Mayan for little channel) Marine Reserve...
...elephants are a short-term problem in the long-term problem of the whole ecosystem," said Iain Douglas-Hamilton, a researcher on elephant behavior. "They are an indicator...
...fishery expert with the Marine Research Institute in Bergen, Norway, has become diluted in the water and disappeared. Most of the experts in Alaska privately agree with that dispiriting theory, but no one wants to be the first to say that the remaining oil has seeped irretrievably into the ecosystem...