Sinharaja Forest Reserve

The last undisturbed are of reforest in Sri Lanka, this forest reserve occupies the heart of the islands wet zone. On most days the forest is shrouded by copious rain clouds that replenish its deep soils and balance water resources for mush of southwestern Sri Lanka.

The reserve comprises 18,899 hectares of natural and modified forest, measuring about 2 km east to west and 3.7 km north to south. The forest contains 211 higher plant species belonging to 119 genera and 43 families. Endemics comprise between 75 and 95% of these.

Fauna studies have identified 255 vertebrate species, 24%of the endemic to Sri Lanka. Among mammals and butterflies endemism is over 50%. Many fascinating animals live in the canopy related by the trees. They include the purple-faced leaf monkey and the toque macaque, a subspecies of he bonnet macaque. Mouse deer, barking and sambar deer graze below and are preyed n y Sinharaja’s largest carnivore, the leopard.

Sinharaja Forest Reserve comprising the existing and proposed forest reserves, was declared a biosphere reserve in April and inscribed on the World Heritage list in 1988.
Sinharaja Forest Reserve

Great Smoky Mountains National Park

In 1923 a Great Smoky Mountains Conservation Association was established with Willis Davies as president.

On December 13, 1926 the Southern Appalachian National Park Committee recommended the establishment of two parks, Shenandoah in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia and the Great Smoky Mountains in Tennessee and North Carolina. In 1934, Great Smoky Mountains National Park was finally established, preserving unique mountain landscape for future generation.

The park houses the best and most complete collection of historic log buildings in the eastern US.

More than one hundred modest homes, gristmills, one-room schoolhouses, barns, outbuildings and churches remain to tell the story of the European settlers who began to arrive here in the late 1770s, as well as their descendents who lived and worked here until the national park was established in 1934.

Five different forest types dominate the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and together they support 130 species of tree and 4000 other plant species.

The Smokies are something of an eastern rainforest in that they received more than 80 inches of rainfall annually. The park is also home to more than 1800 black bears, 80 Canadian elk, and some 100,000 living organism, making it one of the most diverse collections of flora and fauna in the Southern Appalachian.

Its biological diversity is the major reason the park was named an International Biosphere Reserve and World Heritage Site.
Great Smoky Mountains National Park