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posted by cmn32480 on Friday October 30 2015, @02:54AM   Printer-friendly
from the what-about-mastadons dept.

New research shows that the loss of large animals has had strong effects on ecosystem functions, and that reintroducing large animal faunas may restore biodiverse ecosystems.

Rewilding is gaining a lot of interest as an alternative conservation and land management approach in recent years, but remains controversial. It is increasingly clear that Earth harbored rich faunas of large animals -- such as elephants, wild horses and big cats -- pretty much everywhere, but that these have starkly declined with the spread of humans across the world -- a decline that continues in many areas.

A range of studies now show that these losses have had strong effects on ecosystem functions, and a prominent strain of rewilding, trophic rewilding, focuses on restoring large animal faunas and their top-down food-web effects to promote self-regulating biodiverse ecosystems.

Science for a wilder Anthropocene: Synthesis and future directions for trophic rewilding research (full PDF)

takyon: Pleistocene Park: Return of the Mammoth's Ecosystem (2005)


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  • (Score: 2) by frojack on Friday October 30 2015, @07:39PM

    by frojack (1554) on Friday October 30 2015, @07:39PM (#256628) Journal

    Roundup is not "poured" onto the plants.
    Its usually applied before planting.
    And the amount used [geneticliteracyproject.org] is probably far less than your most conservative estimates.

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  • (Score: 1) by tftp on Friday October 30 2015, @08:22PM

    by tftp (806) on Friday October 30 2015, @08:22PM (#256640) Homepage

    And the amount used is probably far less than your most conservative estimates.

    Herbicides, including the Round-Up, are sold at Home Depot. They are used in significant quantities. I used them myself. A "1/3 of a drop per square foot" will do nothing. Maybe it will kill one blade of grass. There is a reason why they are sold in gallon-sized containers with a sprayer. It's not because so many homeowners have a lawn that you need a helicopter to cross.

    If you look at the specs [homedepot.com], 1.33 gal is good for only 400 sq. feet. That is far closer to the size of a common lawn. If you do the arithmetic, it becomes 12.5 ml per square foot. Here are a few MSDS [roundup.com.au], and they do not declare the material harmless.

    There are many application instructions [monsanto.com] from Monsanto on the Internet. Farmers use less material per acre (1-2 liters per acre,) however they are spraying concentrate that they are diluting before spraying. But in the end it doesn't matter what units we use to quantify the application, gallons or drops - all that matters is the effect. So far Roundup seems to work, but as I said nobody can tell if that will remain so a few years down the road. If it fails... now what?