Word: dipterocarps
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...cutting, for instance, but once forest fragments shrink beyond some unknown threshold, the entire system loses its ability to recover. page refers to a recent study led by the University of Michigan's Lisa Curran, who contends that human activities such as logging may have doomed Indonesia's great dipterocarp trees, the anchor of its rain forests...
...nature to overwhelm the appetites of fruit and seedeaters and ensure that there are always some seeds left over to sprout. The strategy, called masting, worked for millions of years. Now, however, the forests in Borneo have been so reduced that humans and animals can consume all the dipterocarp fruit, with the result that no new dipterocarp trees are taking root in the areas studied by Curran and her colleagues. Since a host of creatures ranging from the orangutan to the boar are dependent on the dipterocarps, the trees' disappearance may ultimately doom Indonesia's rain-forest ecosystem. PAGE scientist...
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