Climate change and human actions are threatening the Canary laurel forests, environmentalists have claimed. They say that unless urgent action is taken, the last remnants of subtropical Afri-can and Canarian forests will face a serious danger of collapse and extinction. The claims are made following a study by the Royal Botanical Garden of Madrid and the Canary Botanical Garden Viera y Clavijo. The humid Canary Islands’ laurels next to the Afromontane forests are considered hot spots of biodiversity, san-ctuaries that house irreplace-able species in the tree of life, the researchers point out. These forests represent the last remnants of subtropical forests that have managed to survive throughout the African continent, which have suffered a long history of extinction due to climate changes and human activities such as logging and indiscriminate burning and grazing. In order to study the demographic dynamics of these forests, the researchers chose as a model species widely distributed in these habitats and apparently not threatened. For this they used species of the Canarina genus, plants known for being the “national flower” of the Canary Islands and also present in East Africa, from Ethiopia to Malawi. These species are considered living fossils, “the last survivors of their lineages, representatives of a unique and evolutionarily ancient biodiversity.” After an intensive sampling of the populations of the species, the researchers used molecular tools that showed an alarming decline in the genetic diversity of all the populations studied. In addition, they carried out demographic research mo-dels that revealed a population decline since the last ice age until today. According to the study, in which French and Swiss researchers have colla-borated, there is a time lag from the reduction of a habitat to its collapse and disappearance. “This effect, known as extinction debt, is not obvious in the short term, but manifests itself over time,” explains Mario Mairal, currently a researcher at the University of Stellenbosch (South Africa) and leader of the study, who added: “The spiral of extinction facing these organisms demands urgent conservation measures, neces-sary to preserve the last remnants of these forests that remain throughout the world.”
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