Word: habitat
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Ride your bike or take the #74 bus to Belmont center to Habitat for the Environment. It's a 15-minute walk from the bus stop to the site and the first visit is free to students...
...least 19 gorillas, not to mention small populations of okapi, red river hogs, mandrills, wolf monkeys and about 70 other exotic species. The exhibit is intended not only to attract visitors but also to direct their attention--and their dollars--toward the plight of the animals' native habitat in the Congo basin, an area about the size of Western Europe that finds itself under relentless assault from loggers, poachers and chronic civil unrest...
...LOSS OF HABITAT Gorillas still roam extensive areas in Central Africa. But they find themselves increasingly confined to smaller and smaller islands of forest, only a fraction of which have been set aside as wild-animal preserves. Logging is a major problem, although if done prudently the displacement is temporary; the removal of selected trees can even increase, over time, the type of vegetation gorillas prefer. Logging roads, on the other hand, are deadly because they provide access to poachers...
...civil wars that have killed or dislocated millions of Central Africans in the past decade have also made gorillas more vulnerable to depredations. "Even now," says Amy Vedder of the Wildlife Conservation Society, "significant portions of gorilla habitat are unreachable by conservation forces because of the continued fighting. Until that stops, we won't even know what we've lost...
...that may get some folks thinking). We?re talking about the northward shift in European butterfly populations. A study published in Thursday?s issue of the journal Nature discovered that 22 out of 35 continental species that researchers tracked either had died out at the southern edges of their habitat or had extended their range northward, or both. The push to the north extended sometimes as far as 150 miles; one species abandoned Spain and spread to Estonia. Scientists interpreted the shift as yet another confirmation of global warming...