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Effects of rural depopulation

Published: 23 January 2009

When communities are broken apart by migration towards towns and cities, rural life suffers. But now, researchers writing in Tropical Conservation Science journal, have revealed that biodiversity can also be affected when humans move away. Aerin Jacob, a biologist at McGill University, and her team discovered that as people leave an area, one dominant habitat (usually secondary forest or savannah) comes to take over from the diverse mosaic of human-maintained landscapes.

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