Tropical rainforests likely once covered nearly 25 million square miles. Estimates vary widely on how much is being lost every year. Many human activities directly or indirectly contribute to deforestation, and almost everywhere that there are lots of people, the forest is being destroyed. Millions of people now live in moist tropical regions. In the past forty years alone, 90 percent of the wet lowland forests in western Ecuador (a country on the west coast of South America) have been cleared. These vanished forests were once home to 10,000 species of plants, and about 2,500 of these were found nowhere else in the world.