REARRANGED ORDER - Deforestation (GCSE Biology)

Deforestation

Deforestation

Reasons for Deforestation

Deforestation is the clearing of forests (or other habitats such as glaciers). Deforestation is done for different reasons:

• To make way for food crop growth, livestock production and housing.
• To extract natural resources. For example, fossil fuels and getting wood from trees.

Deforestation occurs often in tropical areas. this is to provide more and more land for farming. This is required to provide area for paddy fields and for cattle. Moreover, land must be made to grow crops, such as maize, which as used to provide biofuels.

Consequences

Deforestation has several severe consequences:

• Deforestation ruins habitats. The biggest impact is habitat destruction. Loss of habitat results in loss of shelter, food, water, and other resources that other organisms need to survive.
• Loss of habitat causes extinction. Habitat destruction leads to extinctions and die offs of different species in the ecosystem. This leads to loss of biodiversity which puts the ecosystem in a state of poor biological health.
• Loss of trees leads to soil erosion. Tree roots hold soil in place. Without tree roots, rain and wind can remove the soil from the area. This leads to loss of nutritional value of the soil, which impacts the growth of plants, which in turn impacts the entire ecosystem.
• Deforestation can cause leaching. This is when nutrients are washed away from the soil before being taken up by the trees, leaving behind infertile soil. Hence, when trees are cut down, the roots don’t absorb the nutrients so they are just washed away.
• Deforestation causes flooding. Flooding increases as usually, when it rains, the rain hits the leaves of trees first then it is slowly absorbed into the ground. Without trees, the rate of absorption isn’t slowed so flooding increases.
• Carbon dioxide levels increase. Trees photosynthesise and remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere so the lack of trees reduces this process. Carbon dioxide is also released when the trees are burnt. Therefore, the carbon cycle (discussed previously) is disturbed.
• Evapotranspiration of water is disturbed. This involves the transpiration of water from tree leaves and the evaporation of water from the earth’s surface. As seen previously in the water cycle, water returns to the earth via precipitation. Deforestation disturbs this as evapotranspiration reduces which makes the climate drier in the local area.

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