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One of the best preserved tropical dry forests occur in Oahu.
This forest consists mainly of native species and is very similar to what the
Polynesians saw when they first arrived to the Hawaiian islands.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_49R_J8Zpaw |
Hawaii contains one of the world's most degraded ecosystems. The cause of this can be dated back to 2000-800 years BP, when the first Polynesians arrived on the Hawaiian islands. The arrival of the Polynesians caused a drastic change in the environment on all of the Hawaiian islands. In order to provide a habitat for living, the Polynesians practiced slash-and-burn agriculture and burned most of the forests in the lowlands. The Polynesians cleared most of the lowlands to plant taro, the staple of their diet and they also lived off of fish from the sea. (10) They brought 24 different species of plants with them that were used for various needs.(4) The planting of non-native species to protect watersheds for agriculture by the Europeans also prompted a loss of native tree species in the lowlands. The use of agriculture and land mass for living degraded a lot of the lowlands and now native tropical forests in the lowlands on most islands have disappeared. Native tropical forests are now only in isolated areas on steep slopes. On most islands, there is an abundant amount of diversity of trees. With sediment cores we can know what the original state of the forest was and what it looked like. The pollen in the sediment can tell us what types of species of plants were present before the Polynesians first arrived. (3)
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/geog/tdfpacific/hawaii.html#top
http://www.hawaiianencyclopedia.com/first-polynesians-first-hawaii.asp
Mariam Hovhannisyan