Sinharaja Rain Forest: Human Impacts

The main problems that the Sinharaja rain forest face are directly related to humans. The negative impacts that humans create include encroachment, gemming, extracting resources from the forest, and poaching. Encoraching is a problem because compared to the forests’ earlier history, there have been an increased amount of people actually going into the forest. This is not a serious problem, but there is an evident negative consequence to a forest’s natural environment being disturbed more often. Most people who enter the forest, look for resources and extract them in order to make a profit for either themselves or someone else. Two examples of this would be villagers collecting resources for merchants, and merchants searching for gems. Merchants often times hire villagers to go into the forest for them and extract resources such as timber and rattan. The villagers comply with the merchants’ requests because of their need of money and because they recognize that the items they take from the forest, such as timber, is used to make items which they consume. Gemming is an issue, not only because merchants are taking gems from the forest, but also because of the method used to take the gems. When digging for gems, they create big holes. These holes are usually open and very dangerous for both humans and animals. Although poaching animals does happen, it is not as widespread of a problem as the others previously mentioned. Although these are serious problems in context of the forest, it is important to realize that the overall conservation status is good. Therefore, these problems are not so significant compared to problems that other rain forests are encountering today. (http://www.sinharaja.4t.com/)

http://www.globalinksl.com/sinharaja-forest-reserve.html