Abstract:
Agricultural ecosystems provide important habitats for many wild plant and animal species. This is especially the case for traditional farming areas that cultivate diverse species.However, rising demand for food and other agricultural products has seen large-scale clearing of natural habitats to make room for intensive monocultures. Recent examples include the conversion of lowland rainforests in Indonesia to oil palm plantations, and of large areas of the Amazon rainforest and Brazilian savanna to soybean and cattle farms. In Narok it’s not a different case, Mau forest have been cleared to farm potatoes and maize. This have seen large tracts of this nature forest converted into agriculture settlement zones. In the more arid parts of Narok, charcoal burning is alarming. Women have made this a thriving economic activity in the expense of environmental degradation. This have left land derelict and uninhabitable.This ongoing habitat loss threatens entire ecosystems as well as many species. Expanding oil palm plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia, for example, pose the most significant threats to endangered megafauna including Asian elephant, Sumatran rhinoceros, and birds like the Taita thrus and the Egyptian vulture that is endangered. The use of pesticides, fertilizers and other agrochemicals has increased hugely since the 1950s. For example, the amount of pesticide sprayed on fields has increased 26-fold over the past 50 years.
These chemicals don't just stay on the fields they are applied to. Some application methods – such as pesticide spraying by aeroplane – lead to pollution of adjacent land, rivers or wetlands. Due to inappropriate water management and irrigation technology, fertilizers and pesticides also commonly run-off from fields to adjacent rivers and lakes and contaminate groundwater sources. These chemicals eventually end up in the marine environment too.
