21st Century Satellite Orbiting Earth Tropical rain forests cover less than seven percent of Earth's surface, but are home to more than half of all plant and animal species. Biodiversity, the range of life, has become a major environmental concern. Many tropical plants and animals produce chemicals useful in medicine and other industries.
Trees hold more carbon than crops.
More than 64,000 square miles of tropical forest are destroyed around the world each year, leading to extinction of large numbers of plants and trees. In South America, for instance, there has been major deforestation of Brazil's Amazon River basin, the largest continuous tropical forest region in the world. More than 6,000 square miles of the basin are deforested each year. NASA helps Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama protect the ecology of their rain forests by training technicians to use satellite data to measure Central American vegetation and forest cover and monitor endangered plant and animal habitats. For instance, Guatemala uses information from satellites to supervise 14,000 square miles of forest and savannah in a northeastern reserve.