Daintree Rainforest, geography 5

1) Daintree Rainforest in northern Australia

http://wildfell2011-5b-daintree.wikispaces.com/file/view/map_of_the_daintree_rainforest.png/279479428/492x375/map_of_the_daintree_rainforest.png

2) Images of the Rainforest

-Cooper Creek

http://www.ritas-outback-guide.com/images/cooper-creek-21276074.jpg

-King Fern Creek 

http://www.ccwild.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/3.jpg

-A tree 

http://www.nams.ca/MagiBlog//wp-content/uploads/2010/11/2010.10.27-Daintree-rainforest-tree.jpg

-Water

http://www.daintreecoast.com/userfiles/image/daintree_rainforest.jpg



3) Historical state of Daintree Rainforest

The Daintree Rainforest is the oldest tropical rainforest in all of the world being over 135 million years old. It is the largest area of rainforest in Australia but only takes up 20 % of Australia. It is located at the northeastern coast of Australia. 430 species of birds live in this rainforest, 13 of them being found only in the Daintree rainforest. It also contains 30% of frog, reptile, and marsupial species in Australia and 65% of the continent's butterfly and bat population. Also a total of 20% of the bird species on Australia can be found in the rainforest. This specific rainforest has overcame a lot of Earth's natural disasters and it "is an outstanding example of the major stages in the earth's evolutionary history, an example of significant ongoing ecological and biological processes, and an example of superlative natural phenomena." (http://www.therainforests.info/landscape/daintree.htm) The components of the rainforest are especially different with all the mountains, streams and beautiful waterfalls. Daintree has such an extraordinary and diverse amount of plant and animal species dating millions of years ago. Around 65 million years ago the Australian continent was covered in rainforests, but climate changes dried it out. Because the climate changed the rainforest had drastic changes and was never the same.

http://www.therainforests.info/landscape/daintree.htm
http://mstmh.tripod.com/
http://www.wilderness.org.au/regions/queensland/daintree

4) Human impacts on Daintree Rainforest

There are a few main negative human impacts on the Daintree Rainforest because of the resources around the area of the rainforest. Two reasons are the fact that the living cost around the area is very low and therefore is very inviting for people to move to that area and people want to tour the area. More and more people continue to move to the less expensive areas of Australia and migrate north to the area of the rainforest. Also many people want to visit and tour the beautiful, historic rainforest. With the tourism it brings a lot of negative factors like the smog and smoke from tour buses which puts off a mass amount of carbon dioxide which we know is bad for the environment. The fact that more people are moving to the area and visiting the area brings harm to that environment. The development needed to accommodate the people migrating and touring is starting to deteriorate the rainforest. Roads, houses, buildings, boundaries and transportation cause a lot of things to be dug up and torn down to accommodate these activities. Also in building houses and communities there needs to be a sewage system which pollutes the areas and is not good for the environment. These impacts are detrimental to the rainforest and the animal and plant species that live there. 

Three other resourceful opportunities are farming, mining, and logging. All three of these actions are harmful because they destroy the rainforest in some way. In order to farm they would have to burn down parts of the forest to clear it and then begin farming for the people who have moved to the area and create a profit. Logging effects the rainforest in the same type of way as farming because it is cutting down a large portion of trees to sell them for easy money and therefore damaging a lot of the rainforest. With mining there is a lot of digging up taking place to find minerals to make a profit. All these actions are selfish and money entitled. In these acts they are strictly for making money and getting rich off of the rainforests natural resources. With all these negative impacts they affect the plant and animal species are effected in many ways and endanger them. 

http://mstmh.tripod.com/

http://www.therainforests.info/landscape/daintree.htm

5) What is likely to happen to Daintree in the future?
If things continue how they are and more and more things get torn down and demolished for the developments that are being made then the Daintree rainforest is not going to sustain how it is now. The main problem with things happening in this area is tourism. Tourists come to see the Daintree rainforest and it will continually bring more and more people and that brings more cars and buses and infrastructures which is not good for the rainforest. Lots of the rainforest will be greatly hurt and it will lose a lot of its beauty and start to slowly deteriorate it. Tourism is not good for the plants or the animals and could hurt those two in many unforseen ways.

6) What can be done to improve human impacts on the Daintree?
 When trying to maintain a balance between the ecosystem and the people there need to be steps taken. Tourists need to be mindful of how they act and carry themselves around the rainforest to ensure that they aren't hurting the rainforest. Less things should be built or the things being built in the area need to halt and be thought about again. The amount of cars and buses used for tourism should be thought over as well. Maybe having a limit on the amount of automobiles and people per week. Other ideas need to be thought of so that there isn't such harmful things happening to this historic rainforest. Everyone needs to be educated and aware of what they are doing and know the effects that it has on the beautiful Daintree rainforest.

7)Table supporting my assessment.

This table supports my assessment of the human impacts. The logging of trees stopped in 1988.

http://epubs.scu.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1529&context=esm_pubs

8) Reference list:

"The Daintree Rainforest Australia." N.p., n.d. Web. <http://www.therainforests.info/landscape/daintree.htm>.

"Daintree Rainforest." N.p., n.d. Web. <http://mstmh.tripod.com/>.

"The Daintree." The Wilderness Society. N.p., 7 Sept. 2003. Web. <http://www.wilderness.org.au/regions/queensland/daintree>.

N.p., n.d. Web. <http://wildfell2011-5b-daintree.wikispaces.com/file/view/map_of_the_daintree_rainforest.png/279479428 /492x375/map_of_the_daintree_rainforest.png>.

N.p., n.d. Web. <http://www.ccwild.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/3.jpg>.

N.p., n.d. Web. <http://www.daintreecoast.com/userfiles/image/daintree_rainforest.jpg>.

N.p., n.d. Web. <http://www.nams.ca/MagiBlog//wp-content/uploads/2010/11/2010.10.27-Daintree-rainforest-tree.jpg>.

N.p., n.d. Web. <http://www.ritas-outback-guide.com/images/cooper-creek-21276074.jpg>.

Vanclay, Jerome. "Lessons from the Queensland Rainforests: Steps towards Sustainability." N.p., 1996. Web. <http://epubs.scu.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1529&context=esm_pubs>.