Word: savannas
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Tinka and his companion are what was until recently a rarity in Kenya's biggest-drawing game park: tour guides working in the land of their fathers. Though the vast stretch of savanna lies in territory owned by the Masai, until a few years ago the red-robed pastoralists made up less than 20% of those employed in its camps and lodges. Those who could find work did so mostly as low-paid camp guards. Yet there's a growing realization that the Masai and the 590-square-mile (1,530 sq km) national reserve share a common future...
...trees. Members of nearby indigenous communities, with help from the Bolivian green group Friends of Nature Foundation (FAN) and the American nonprofit the Nature Conservancy (TNC), have fanned out across the Noel Kempff's 4.2 million acres (1.7 million ha), which range from Amazon rain forest to dry savanna. In the footsteps of howler monkeys and endangered black jaguars, they follow mapped plots in the forest, drive stakes into the ground and measure out circles with diameters of 13 ft. (4 m) to 46 ft. (14 m) - and then within that area they chart the diameter of every tree...
...dynamic is on vivid display in Brazil, where a Rhode Island--size chunk of the Amazon was deforested in the second half of 2007 and even more was degraded by fire. Some scientists believe fires are now altering the local microclimate and could eventually reduce the Amazon to a savanna or even a desert. "It's approaching a tipping point," says ecologist Daniel Nepstad of the Woods Hole Research Center...
...right. There isn't much sugar in the Amazon. But my next stop was the Cerrado, south of the Amazon, an ecological jewel in its own right. The Amazon gets the ink, but the Cerrado is the world's most biodiverse savanna, with 10,000 species of plants, nearly half of which are found nowhere else on earth, and more mammals than the African bush. In the natural Cerrado, I saw toucans and macaws, puma tracks and a carnivorous flower that lures flies by smelling like manure. The Cerrado's trees aren't as tall or dense as the Amazon...
...with Habré, who tortured and executed thousands of opponents, real and suspected. Déby is a Zaghawa - part of a tribe of black Saharans equally at home in Darfur, Chad and the oases of the Libyan Sahara. Armed by Sudan and Libya, he stormed across the Chadian savanna from rear bases in Darfur and seized power in 1990. Paris ordered its troops to stand aside, congratulated the coup maker and renewed its military cooperation pact with Chad...