Amazon Rainforest Research Paper

The Amazon Rainforest is a home to more than 40,000 types of plant species, 3,000 freshwater fish species, and more than 370 types of reptiles. The Amazon is also described as “Lungs of our Planet” because it provides us with more than 20% of the world’s oxygen, but today this substantial rainforest is being threatened. Just like many other rainforests, the Amazon is currently facing many threats and it is affecting society in various negative ways.

The Amazon is located in South America. It is also a home to more than 30 million people. Every year there is about 80 in of rain. The temperature in the rainforest is usually between seventy and eighty-five degrees Fahrenheit. The Amazon contains the longest river in the world known as the Amazon River. The rainforest contains about 3000 fruit. Only 200 hundred are of these fruits are being used in the Western World, and the Natives use about 2,000 of it. The Amazon is fifty percent of all tropical rainforest on Earth. In some places in the rainforest, the branches and leaves

of the many plants restrict sunlight from coming through leaving the Amazon floor in darkness. About eighty percent of the food we eat today originally comes from the Amazon. Every second it delivers 55 million gallons into the Atlantic Ocean.
Even though this forest is quite substantial it is in danger.

The Amazon forest faces threats like climate change, cattle ranching and agricultural expansion, badly planned infrastructure, illegal logging, oil exploration, gold mining, overharvesting of fish or other water species, commercial fishing, biopiracy and smuggling, poaching, and lastly damming. Eighty percent of cut down forest areas in the Amazon are cattle. Runoff from pastures pollutes rivers. Fires used to control fields often spread into the remaining forest. The people that commercial fish usually lose up to sixty percent of the fish due to spoilage. 232,000 square miles of Amazon has been destroyed due to logging. In the Amazon about sixty to eighty percent of logging is done illegally. Rainforests used to cover about fourteen percent of earth surface but now it is only six percent. If we don’t stop all these threats in about forty years there won’t be any rainforests at

all.
Fortunately, there are solutions to these threats. Humans could recycle our paper because much of the paper used today comes from the Amazon forest. Some ways to stop the threats from agriculture and ranching are by introducing animals and crops to smaller areas of land that won’t wear out the land quickly. We can also reduce the consumption of meat. The governments could also create, improve and enforce stricter laws against all these threats. New ways of making energy should be found that do not have negative effects on the ecosystem. After logging trees, we should replant them so that they grow back. Educating people about the threats will also help reduce the threats.
There are many current threats facing the Amazon and if we don’t fix them quickly in forty years there might not be a forest at all. The Amazon is an important area and we shouldn’t destroy it.Since it is one of our main oxygen providers we should be careful how we handle it. We should keep the Amazon Rainforest a healthy ecosystem because you never know it might benefit us in the future.