UNESCO PAPER

UNESCO Paper

UNESCO Paper

The area that I selected for this research paper is Belize Barrier Reef, in this paper I am going to dicuss diversity of life forms in this area.

The Belize Barrier Reef is a sequence of coral reefs spanning the seaboard area of Belize, approximately 300 meters (1,000 ft) offshore in the north and 40 kilometers (25 mi) in the south inside the homeland limits. The Belize Barrier Reef is a 300 kilometers (186 mi)-long part of the 900 kilometers (560 mi)-long Mesoamerican Barrier Reef System, which is relentless from Cancun on the northeast tilt of the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico through to offshore Guatemala, producing it the second biggest coral reef system in the world after the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. Charles Darwin recounted the Belize Barrier Reef as "the most amazing reef in the West Indies" in 1842. (Spellerberg 2004)

It is Belize's peak tourist place travelled to, appealing nearly half of its yearly 260,000 tourists, and crucial to its fishing industry. Conditions for scuba diving and snorkeling are perfect since water visibility routinely comes to 100-plus feet; water temperatures hover round 80 qualifications Fahrenheit; and the barrier reef makes for serene water most of the year.

Coral can be perceptive to ecological alterations, for example alterations in nutrients, warmth, and contamination, as well as personal impairment associated to tourism and fishing. In latest years, anxiety has developed that weather change affiliated with international heating and hurtful leverages of human use have become a grave and compounding risks to the reef. Both the dwelling coral and the wondrous other animals who live at the reef are in jeopardy without the supplement of shielding measures. (www.unep-wcmc.org)

The Belize Barrier Reef System boasts a varied ecosystem and more diversity of coral formation than any location additional in the Caribbean. It lies on the rim of a continental shelf roughly 160 miles (257 km) long and 10-25 miles (15-40 km) wide. Within a half mile (800 meters) of the reef crest, the seaward for demonstration of the ledge lets fall sharply to 9,000 feet (3,000 m). (Zagorski 2004)

The ocean is predominantly superficial north of Belize City, forming a flat ledge where ocean lawn grows. With the exclusion of Ambergris Caye, the cayes in this locality are mangrove in source, constructed up by sedimentation over the years. South of Drowned Cayes, the ledge starts a slow fall to depths of 180 feet (60 m) at the south end. There is a stepwise broadening of the back reef lagoon as it proceeds southward.

The centered back reef is distinuished by a deep conduit running in a north-south main heading from Belize City to the Gulf of Honduras, enclosed on the east by superficial ledge and on the west by the mainland coast. The seaward ledge, which terminates at the reef crest, has many patch reefs and a couple of mangrove cayes. Grass apartments cover most of the superficial base between the cayes and patch reefs. (www.eoearth.org Retrieved )

The south reef ledge is a very broad part of the lagoon, topped ...