wildmadagascar.orgMadagascar: stunning wildlife, landscapes, and cultural diversity

☰ Home - About - Contact ✕ About Madagascar Home Overview Flora Wildlife Environment Twitter Facebook About Contact WildMadagascar.org highlights Madagascar's stunning wildlife, landscapes, and cultural diversity. Madagascar is a land like no other. An island roughly the size of Texas or France, Madagascar is home to more than 250,000 species of which 70% are found nowhere else on the globe. About Madagascar Wildlife People History Environment Photos Geography : Madagascar can be divided into five geographical regions: the east coast, the Tsaratanana Massif, the central highlands, the west coast, and the southwest. The highest elevations parallel the east coast, whereas the land slopes more gradually to the west coast. Geography of Madagascar Culture : are of the past; where in many areas taboo and tradition takes precedence over the law; and western-style religion is freely mixed with beliefs in sorcery and unparalleled funerary customs. The People of Madagascar Plant biodiversity : Madagascar is home to as many as 12,000 plant species -- 70-80% of which are endemic -- making it one of the most diverse floras on the planet. Flora of Madagascar . Animal biodiversity : Madagascar has some of the highest biodiversity on the planet. Of roughly 200,000 known species found on Madagascar, about 150,000 are endemic. Unique to the island are more than 50 types of lemurs, 99 percent of its frog species, and 36 genera of birds. Madagascar houses 100 percent of the world's lemurs, half of its chameleon species, 6 percent of its frogs, and none of its toads. Some species found in Madagascar have their closest relatives not in Africa but in the South Pacific and South America. Wildlife of Madagascar . Madagascar News In Madagascar, cultural taboos can protect or harm the environment - “Fady,” the Malagasy term for sociocultural and spiritual taboos or beliefs, greatly influence people’s daily lives in Madagascar. - Fady are ancestral rules that can apply to a place, a person or even certain animals and plants. - As they pertain to the natural world, fady can have either a positive or a negative impact on the environment and wildlife. Madagascar’s vanishing trees - Madagascar has a documented 2,900 endemic species of trees, but a new report shows that almost two-thirds of them are in danger of disappearing. - Of the 3,118 species covered, more than 90% had never been systematically evaluated before, and one in 10 fell in the IUCN’s critically endangered category, a step away from going extinct in the wild. - Though the island nation’s protected area network has expanded to more than 7 million hectares (17 million acres), a tenth of the tree species are found outside this safety net. - Scientists are racing against the extinction clock to document this mind-boggling biodiversity and determine just how imperiled individual species are. Ghost fish: after 420 million years in the deeps, modern gillnets from shark fin trade drag coelacanths into the light - Undersea canyons off Madagascar may turn out to be the Indian Ocean epicentre for coelacanths, the remarkable “fossil fish” which re-surfaced from apparent extinction in 1938. - Coelacanths have turned up with unexpected frequency in gill-nets set in deep waters to catch sharks for new, commercial markets. - A worrying trend in recent coelacanth catches in Madagascar is the high proportion of pregnant females, which are thought to produce just 140 live babies during their entire lifecycle. - Marine scientists are calling for reinforcement of conservation measures to protect this population from the pressure of incidental gill-net captures driven by the shark fin trade. ‘Bad science’: Planting frenzy misses the grasslands for the trees - Planting trees by the millions has come to be considered one of the main ways of reining in runaway carbon emissions and tackling climate change. - But experts say many tree-planting campaigns are based on flawed science: planting in grasslands and other non-forest areas, and prioritizing invasive trees over native ones. - Experts point out that not all land is meant to be forested, and that planting trees in savannas and grasslands runs the risk of actually reducing carbon sequestration and increasing air temperature. - The rush to reforest has also led to fast-growing eucalyptus and acacia becoming the choice of tree for planting, despite the fact they’re not native in most planting areas, and are both water-intensive and fire-prone. Madagascar: Businesses drive disappearance of a wetland ‘reed forest’ - Lake Alaotra and its surrounding marshes are Madagascar’s largest wetland, a Ramsar Site that is home to globally significant biodiversity. - Despite layers of legal protection and conservation programming, around 850 hectares (2,100 acres) of marsh disappear each year to make way for rice cultivation, much of it perpetrated by businesses. - Local people are keenly feeling the lake’s decline, though, and a commitment to protecting it, along with some success stories, persist in pockets around its shores. - The government is implementing a zero-tolerance campaign against illegal environmental destruction, but it remains to be seen whether this can reduce the lawlessness and impunity enough to safeguard the lake. New map shows where the 80% of species we don’t know about may be hiding - A new study maps out the regions of the world most likely to hold the highest number of species unknown to science. - The study found that tropical forests in countries like Brazil, Indonesia, Madagascar and Colombia had the highest potential for undescribed species, mostly reptiles and amphibians. - According to the lead researcher, the main reason for species going undescribed is a lack of funding and taxonomic experts in some parts of the world. - He added that it’s essential to learn about as many species as possible to protect them, but that undescribed species are currently not taken into account by governing bodies like the UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). Slash-and-burn farming eats away at a Madagascar haven for endangered lemurs, frogs - The Ankeniheny-Zahamena Corridor (CAZ), a protected area in Madagascar, has experienced a surge in deforestation in the past five months, driven largely by slash-and-burn agriculture. - The loss of forest threatens rare and endangered wildlife found nowhere else, including lemurs and frogs and geckos, conservationists say. - Other factors fueling the deforestation include mining for gemstones and cutting of trees to make charcoal. - The problem in CAZ is emblematic of a wider trend throughout the central eastern region of Madagascar, in both protected and unprotected areas, where 1.5 million hectares (3.7 million acres) of tree cover has been lost since 2001. Reforested areas rival mature forests in securing water, study finds - New research from Madagascar shows that young scrubby forests can in some ways be better at retaining water than older mature forests. - They provide similar benefits in preventing runoff but use up lesser water, according to a recently published paper in the Journal of Applied Ecology. - However, some hydrologists say the effects of evapotranspiration, water released back into the atmosphere by trees, on rainfall in areas farther afield must not be ignored. - If scrubby forests are as efficient as older ones in retaining water, it means reforestation boosts water resources available to communities who take part in reforestation drives. Madagascar: Young farmers adopt new methods to help lemurs, forests and themselves - Threatened by unsustainable farming methods and hunting, the forests of Mangabe-Ranomena-Sahasarotra in eastern Madagascar, and the lemurs that live there, are in danger. - A project aims to train young villagers in the region in sustainable farming techniques and to raise their awareness of lemur protection. - These young people are trained to be ambassadors for the pro...