Amazon rainforest is known as the paradise of trees and wild. It has been often believed that the vast expanse of nature was truly untouched by humans. At their recent studies, scientists proved that conventional thought wrong. Several studies on this place indicate that the paradise of nature was actually shaped by humans.
An international group of ecologists and social scientists led by Ph.D. student Carolina Levis from Brazil's National Institute for Amazonian Research and Wageningen University and Research in Netherlands started exploring the Amazon. In the journal of Science, researchers have unveiled that thousands of years ago indigenous pre-Columbian peoples used to cultivate at that place. This contribution by those peoples helped amazon rainforest to get into a shape that is presently known.
Levis and her team collected more than 1,000 forest survey data on the map and compared with 3,000 novel archaeological sites across the Amazon where human beings are known to have ever settled. Researchers generated first Amazon-wide picture how pre-Columbian people influenced the amazonian biodiversity by comparing the forest composition from various archaeological sites.
Co-author of this study and Senior Conservation Ecologist From Chicago's Field Museum, Nigel Pitman said in a statement,“Some of the tree species that are abundant in Amazonian forests today, are probably common because they were planted by people who lived there long before the arrival of European colonists”. Science Daily reported that 85 tree species researchers found those were used as food, shelter, or other purposes by amazonian peoples through a couple of last thousand years.
Species in mature upland forests were five times more likely common than the non-domesticated species throughout the Amazon basin. Domesticated species in some several parts of the basin were both more common and more diverse with those archaeological sites those were closer to the forest.
Amazon rainforest is also known as the lungs of the Earth. Most of the trees in Amazon rainforest are playing important role in in nature and economy.
