Large Sections Of Stunning Madagascar Forests Featured In "Our Planet" Have Already Been Destroyed
Viewers inspired by Netflix’s new series “Our Planet” to explore the stunning landscapes it captures may find one destination shockingly different from its lustrous on-screen depiction: Between the shooting for the series in 2016 and its launch this month, there has been such rapid deforestation in Madagascar’s Kirindy Forest that large patches of the forest showcased in the series have disappeared from our planet.
In the eighth installment of the production, titled “Forests,” British naturalist and narrator David Attenborough guides viewers through various forest ecosystems, including the dry deciduous forests of the Menabe Antimena protected area in western Madagascar. “We had teams working all around the Kirindy region. Images were captured wherever we could get the pieces to our story, a mix of time lapses and behavior, and forest destruction,” Jeff Wilson, one of the producers of the show, told Mongabay.
The series is a result of a four-year-long collaboration between the international conservation NGO World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), Netflix and U.K.-based Silverback Films, where Wilson works. “On return from Madagascar in 2016, the film crew drew on satellite maps provided by NASA from the areas in which they had visited and had been working, only to find that the 2018 images showed the forest to the south of the main filming location was no longer present,” a spokesperson for WWF Madagascar said in an emailed response.
Madagascar, the world’s oldest island, supports a breathtaking array of plant and animal species found nowhere else on the planet. Viewers get a glimpse of this richness through the show: from the distinctive mating habits of the cat-like fossa (Cryptoprocta ferox), including a male fossa humping a tree to leave its scent and send a message to the couple mating in its branches, to the feeding habits of Madame Berthe’s mouse lemur (Microcebus berthae), one of the smallest primates in the world. The forests of Menabe Antimena are also home to several threatened lemur species, a kind of primate endemic to Madagascar and the Comoros archipelago.
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Forests in the Menabe Antimena protected area are being devoured for crop cultivation at an unprecedented rate. While some of it is for subsistence farming, a majority of these are plantations of cash crops like corn. Between 2001 and 2016, approximately 18,000 hectares (44,500 acres) or about a fifth of the tree cover disappeared, according to data from the University of Maryland, accessed through the monitoring platform Global Forest Watch. This loss has accelerated swiftly in recent years; in 2016, about 2,000 hectares (5,000 acres) of tree cover was lost, but in 2017, this jumped to 10,000 hectares, an area 30 times the size of New York’s Central Park. Last year, Madagascar lost a bigger proportion of its primary rainforests than any other tropical country- 2%.
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https://news.mongabay.com/2019/04/that-madagascan-forest-featured-in-netflixs-our-planet-its-vanishing-fast/