People & the World's Tropical Rainforests & Tropical Savannas

Population & Land Uses

Tropical savanna’s cover a vast area of the world’s land surface and have traditionally provided homes and livelihoods to a large proportion of the world’s population.  Traditional land uses of savanna areas reflect both the natural environment and the culture of the people involved, and include shifting pastoralism, pastoralism and cultivation, and nomadic hunting and gathering.

By contrast, tropical rainforests have traditionally supported fewer people due to disperse food resources, predominantly in the canopy, and thin leached soils.  Traditional rainforest land uses and life styles include hunter-gatherers, and shifting cultivation combined with hunting.

More recently tropical rainforests have become increasingly exploited for timber, grazing and cultivation (particularly cash crops of tropical plants such as coffee, cocoa, bannans, sugar palm etc), and mining, and provide homes for an increasing percentage of people living in the tropics.  Tropical savannas have also been greatly modified by humans through their efforts to cultivate and graze savanna lands. 

Another important land use within tropical rainforests and savannas is the establishment of national parks and other protected areas facilitating conservation, tourism, and subsistence living (Hutley and Setterfield 2007).  These land uses also present challenges for sustainable management, such as weed and feral animal control, combating illegal poaching and animal trading, managing extensive sparsely populated areas, and balancing the disparate aims of grazing, mining, tourism, subsistence livelihoods and conservation.

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