More than 10 million different species of animals, plants, fungi and other micro-organisms inhabit the Earth. They and the habitats in which they live represent the world's biological diversity. It has been recorded that humans use about 40,000 species of plants and animals for food, shelter, clothing and medicinal needs. Forests are the most diverse ecosystems on land, because they hold the vast majority of the world's terrestrial species. Priceless biodiversity is threatened by deforestation, forest fragmentation and degradation, hunting and the arrival of invasive species from other habitats. We are losing the invaluable treasure at an alarming rate that, it has been estimated that, within the next 10 years, one out of every four known species may have been wiped off the planet. It has also been estimated that to meet the innumerable demands that humans make on nature each year, we may require about more than an additional half of Earth. That is about 1.6 earths to satisfy our greeds!

References

Citation

Citation: Kannan CS Warrier. “Forest Genetics and Tree Breeding".Acta Scientific Agriculture 4.11 (2020): 01-02.

Copyright

Copyright: © 2020 Kannan CS Warrier. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.