• covers 5.500.000 km². Last year, the coverage was 6.700.000 km2. Over a million km² lost in one year.
• 60 % lies in Brazil, the rest in Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname, Venezuela and French Guiana.
• Running through the north of the rainforest is the Amazon River, a network of many hundreds of waterways that stretches over 6.840 km. 
• Home to 2.000.000 indigenous people, 400 different indigenous groups, speaking 300 indigenous languages.
• 10 % of all known and described species live in the Amazonia.
• As we all know, the Amazon has an incredibly rich ecosystem – there are around 40.000 plant species, 1.300 bird species, 3.000 types of fish, 430 mammals and a 2.500.000 insect species.
• More than twice as many fish species live in the Amazon as in any other river in the world.
• 20.000.000.000 tons of water are released into the atmosphere by the trees of the Amazon every day.
• We have already lost an estimated 17 % of the Amazon rainforest, an area the size of France.
• 1/5 of the world’s fresh water flows into the sea from rivers in the Amazon.
• Every minute, 5 football fields of rainforest are cut down (that’s 5 x 7300 m²).
• Due to the thickness of the canopy, the Amazon floor is in permanent darkness. It’s so thick that when it rains, it takes up to ten minutes for the water to reach the ground.
• The productivity of the Amazon rainforest is constrained by the availability of nutrients, in particular phosphorus (P). It’s one of the micronutrients, carried by African dust, which has important implications for the biogeochemical cycle in the Amazon Basin.
• More than 56 % of the dust fertilising the Amazon rainforest comes from the Sahara desert. The yearly Sahara dust replaces the equivalent amount of phosphorus washed away yearly from Amazon soil by rains and floods.
• Without the phosphorus input from African dust, the hydrological loss would greatly deplete the soil phosphorus reservoir over a decades or centuries and affect the health and productivity of the Amazon rainforest.
• Major deforestation reasons are farming, drilling, mining, logging.

Sources:

– WWF

– Amazon aid foundation

– https://www.natgeokids.com/uk/discover/geography/physical-geography/amazon-facts/

– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_rainforest

– Zu H. et al. The fertilizing role of African dust in the Amazon rainforest: A first multiyear assessment based on data from Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observations. 2015

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