Introduction
One of my first experiences with deforestation and habitat loss was by watching the movie Watership Down before I was in elementary school because rabbits were my favorite animal and my parents thought it was a cartoon. If you know anything about that movie, it most certainly is not a cartoon as it humanizes a society of bunnies and then delineates their death at the hands of urban development. I wouldn’t say that the experience was scaring, but I was certainly very distraught after seeing it. With this memory still cemented in my mind a few years later, at six, I started a tree-planting club. It consisted of no real plans as I was so young, but I knew even then that something needed to be done to notice and protect the Earth’s
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Yet, as someone invested on knowing how tree loss can be reduced, it is incredibly worthwhile to look to the changes in the rate of deforestation for a particular area. When thinking of drastic deforestation, my thoughts go to that of the Amazon Rainforest, termed the “lungs of the Earth.”
Investigation
From a mathematical perspective, rates can be viewed from a kinematics perspective, giving one more information that the rate itself does. The following shows the annual deforestation occurring in the Amazon region, according to Rhett A. Butler of Mongabay. The above data can be analyzed in a wide variety of ways, each providing more information about habitat loss in this region of South America. For instance, one can find the average annual forest loss per year with the following formula:
Despite the above number (16600 sq. km/year) representing mean rate, there is much variation from year to year. To get a better understanding of the fluctuation in deforestation over time, one should graph the data as a scatterplot with the x-axis representing time and the y-axis representing tree loss. This was completed using the program GeoGebra and is shown