Illegal logging is threatening Honduras’s Platano River Biosphere Reserve and other tropical forests that are integral parts of a biological corridor that winds through Central America from Mexico to Panama. The U.N. has provided funding for protection of the biosphere reserve since 1971, but logging companies continue to chop down trees illegally and poor farmers continue to clear land for farming. The degradation of forests in Honduras and other Central American nations threatens the larger Mesoamerican Biological Corridor, which serves as a kind of biological highway between South and North America and which is home to a number of indigenous human populations and about 7 percent of the planet’s species, including rare and threatened animals like tapirs and harpy eagles.
