LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Amazon: Amazon Basin
built 629 days ago
In the eastern part of the country, commonly known as the Amazon Basin, heavy rainfall and high humidity are constant features. The vegetation of the Ecuadorian Amazon is exuberant as is its fauna. Within and around the huge protected areas of the Amazon Rain Forest several indigenous ethnic groups live side by side, still living traditionally, each group maintaining its distinct customs and traditions. The Ecuadorian Amazon region is made up of six provinces.
Source:
The Amazon is one of the world's great rainforests. The Amazon river runs 3,000 miles from the Andes to the sea, and is longer than any river but the Nile. The vast Amazon basin covers more than two and a half million square miles, more than any other rainforest. Can you click on the Amazon?
Source:
[H]ow did the Amazon get to be so big? The first reason has to do with its location - right at the equator. Around the "belt line" of the earth lies a warm, tropical zone where over 400 in/1016cm of rain fall every year. That averages out to more than an inch (3cm) of rain, everyday! A lot of water falls onto the land surrounding the river, what is called the "Amazon River drainage basin". A good way to understand what a drainage basin is to think of the whole northern half of the continent of South America as a shallow dish, or saucer. Whenever rain falls and lands anywhere in the river basin it all runs into the lowest place in the pan, which happens to be the Amazon River.
Source:
One of the goals of WWF's work in the Amazon Basin is to promote alternative, sustainable sources of income for people of the region. For example, the promotion of sustainable handcrafts discourages deforestation and delivers economic benefits for indigenous peoples. A donation to WWF supports positive approaches to conservation like this throughout the world. You may choose to receive, as a thank-you gift for your donation, this traditional craft bracelet, handmade out of açai seeds by indigenous people of the Amazon through a fair trade relationship. Keep one and pass along the others to friends to share the message and beauty of conservation.
Source:
In 2005, parts of the Amazon basin experienced the worst drought in 100 years[40], and there were indications that 2006 could have been a second successive year of drought[41]. A 23 July 2006 article in the UK newspaper The Independent reported Woods Hole Research Center results showing that the forest in its present form could survive only three years of drought.[42][43] Scientists at the Brazilian National Institute of Amazonian Research argue in the article that this drought response, coupled with the effects of deforestation on regional climate, are pushing the rainforest towards a "tipping point" where it would irreversibly start to die. It concludes that the forest is on the brink of being turned into savanna or desert, with catastrophic consequences for the world's climate.
Source:
Since World War II the economic development of the Amazon basin has been high on the agenda of every country of which it is a part. From the mid-1940s onward, a number of “penetration roads” have been built from the populous highlands of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia into the Oriente, which have funneled untold numbers of landless peasants into the lowlands.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Amazon Basin