Mexico’s sundry landscapes have few parallels. Straddling the northern boundary of the Tropic of Cancer, the country boasts low-lying deserts and humid rainforests, scrubby chaparral and tangled mangroves, with long spines of the Sierra Madre stitching the country’s starkly different biomes together. Mexico is home to the third-most mammal species of any country and supports a whopping 864 species of reptiles, nearly half of which occur only within Mexico’s borders. What’s more, human culture is deeply intertwined with the natural world here, with known traditional uses for almost a quarter — some 5,000 species — of its plants. “Mexico is a ‘megadiverse’ country,” Daniela Carrión, senior director of project design and oversight at the NGO Conservation International, tells Mongabay. The “megadiverse“ moniker is ascribed to 17 countries holding most of the world’s biodiversity. They typically have high levels of endemic species, plants in particular, that occur nowhere else on Earth. Still, Carrión adds, Mexico “faces a lot of challenges that are similar to all countries in terms of land use options and climate change.” Deforestation for agriculture, as well as logging, water scarcity and sea level rise, all threaten to strain the country’s resilience. The Mexican government has a long history of conservation, Carrión says, with recent moves to boost protected areas to 95 million hectares (235 million acres), covering 14% of the country’s land and a quarter of its seas and oceans by the end of 2024. But maintaining such large areas, which the country hopes to expand on…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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