Morning Glory Pool, Upper Geyser Basin, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, USA. Courtesy PDPhoto

Word of the Month

Endangered Forest

Endangered Forests are the most valuable forests on the globe, forests that would be irreparably harmed by industrial resource extraction. In practical terms this means these forests are "NO GO" and "NO BUY" forests. These forests comprise a large proportion of the world's remaining old-growth, primary and ancient forests in tropical, temperate and boreal zones.

These forests should be protected from industrial-scale resource extraction so that they may continue to provide the many goods and services they supply in their natural state, and to maintain biological diversity in forest ecosystems.

There are four categories of endangered forests:

• Intact forest landscape mosaics,
• Naturally rare forest types,
• Forest types that have been made rare due to human activity, and
• Other forests that are ecologically critical for the protection of biological diversity.