Tony Freeman

Welcome to Tony Freeman’s About Me page, where you will find information on the topic of wildlife. Bookmark this page to keep up to date with Tony’s new posts.

Wildlife Ecosystems

Wildlife ecosystems support life, providing a home for a community of organisms along with environmental components such as water, air and soil, which interact with one another as a system. These abiotic and biotic components are linked together via energy flows and nutrient cycles.An ecosystem can be of any size, but the term usually refers to a specific, limited space. Ecosystems are defined by a network of interactions between resident organisms and their environment.

The Amazon Rainforest

The Amazon Rainforest is the world's most famous, and arguably the world's most important ecosystem. It is a wet, broadleaf forest which covers most of South America's Amazon Basin. The Amazon Rainforest covers territory belonging to some nine separate nations, namely: Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, Bolivia, Guyana, Peru, Ecuador, French Guiana and Suriname. The area of the Amazon Rainforest represents more than 50% of the world's surviving rainforest and is the most biodiverse tropical rainforest in the world. The Amazon Rainforest is estimated to contain in the region of 390 billion trees, composed of an estimated 16,000 distinct species.

The loss of biodiversity resulting from destruction of the Amazon Rainforests is of great concern to Tony Freeman and environmentalists all over the world. Scientific evidence also indicates that the release of carbon from vegetation in the process of land clearance could be a major contributor to global warming. Computer models show that climate change brought about by the release of greenhouse gases could make the Amazon unsustainable, in the event of increased temperatures and reduced rainfall.

Many countries within the Amazon Basin have started initiatives to protect the area from deforestation. It is estimated that there was a drop of some 60% in deforestation rates between 2002 and 2006. Nevertheless, in 2005, areas of the Amazon experienced the worst drought in over a century, and scientists from the Brazilian National Institute of Amazonian Research warned that the rainforest was being pushed towards tipping point. According to the WWF, the combination of deforestation and climate change also fuels forest fires, exacerb