Singapore: A Case-Study for Tropical Rain Forest Fragmentation and Biodiversity Loss

Abstract

Forests throughout the tropics are being cleared at a rate that is causing considerable alarm to many people concerned with the fate of the biological diversity of our planet. The common pattern of human influence on tracts of tropical rain forest is a massive reduction of the forest area and a fragmentation of the habitat into small remnant patches. Tropical rain forests are the most species-rich ecosystems on Earth. Therefore, it would seem very likely that tropical rain forest fragmentation will lead to local and ultimately global extinction of species. Alarming predictions of massive levels of extinction from tropical deforestation have been made (e.g., Myers 1988; Raven 1988). However, a relatively much smaller number of extinctions have actually been documented (Simon 1986; Heywood and Stuart 1992; Smith et al. 1993), and there remains a need to clarify the influences of fragmentation on tropical rain forest biodiversity.