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posted by Fnord666 on Friday September 22 2017, @12:36PM   Printer-friendly
from the heard-good-things-about-oxygen dept.

To find out what works best for reestablishing tropical dry forests, the researchers planted seedlings of 32 native tree species in degraded soil or degraded soil amended with sand, rice hulls, rice hull ash or hydrogel (an artificial water-holding material). After two years, they found that tree species known for traits that make them drought tolerant, such as enhanced ability to use water and capture sunlight, survived better than other species. Some of the soil amendments helped get seedlings off to a good start, but by the end of the experiment there was no difference in survival with respect to soil condition.

"This study is important for a number of reasons," Powers said. "First, it demonstrates that it is possible to grow trees on extremely degraded soils, which provides hope that we can indeed restore tropical dry forests. Second, it provides a general approach to screen native tree species for restoration trails based on their functional traits, which can be applied widely across the tropics.

Is 'ecosystem restoration' the job growth area of the future?


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by bradley13 on Friday September 22 2017, @01:05PM (13 children)

    by bradley13 (3053) on Friday September 22 2017, @01:05PM (#571631) Homepage Journal

    In dry areas, "tree species [that are] drought tolerant...survived better". Wow, call the Nobel committee.

    Of actual interest is that all the soil enhancements were irrelevant - that is a useful result.

    However, the primary point is: why are tropical forests - dry and wet - disappearing? At its root, the answer is simple: overpopulation. There is no way to re-grow those forests, not really, until the population pressure is removed. Remove the population pressure, and the forests will restore themselves. That's what seeds do, after all...

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  • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday September 22 2017, @02:47PM (10 children)

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Friday September 22 2017, @02:47PM (#571652) Journal

    There is no way to re-grow those forests, not really, until the population pressure is removed.

    I dunno. I've been in places that were clear-cut 80 years ago and you couldn't tell now. Yes, if you clearcut the entire forest everywhere at once and killed all the species that lived there, then you're gonna lose diversity in the re-grown forest. But if you selectively clear-cut, replant to avoid loss of topsoil, and let them grow back, species in the adjacent area re-colonize pretty quickly because it's open.

    The Amazon is more of a special case because it has so many micro-climates with very localized species. But even there we now know that the Indians cleared vast swathes of the rain forest and put them under cultivation and nobody was able to tell in modern times until they invented LIDAR and could strip away the vegetation to see it. In other words, the "pristine" rain forest we've all been taught to know and love was clear-cut and heavily populated not all that long ago.

    There's a series that ran on TV and was a book, I believe, titled something like "The World After Us." Its premise was how long would it take nature to reclaim the world if humans suddenly disappeared tomorrow. Not very long in most respects, as it turns out. I forget what the longest remaining traces of humanity were, but radioactive waste and footprints on the Moon were among them.

    We like to think that humans are a plague that will destroy the Earth, but we're not. We're a blip on the Earth's timeline. The only thing humans can destroy is themselves and maybe take some species with them. But we could scarcely do worse, as powerful as we think we are, than the Permian mass-extinction.

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    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @03:56PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @03:56PM (#571679)

      This may be true for temperate forests, but it generally isn't true in the tropics and rainforests. Surveys of biodiversity on a per-square-mile basis find only 20% or so species overlap. Cut down a few square miles and 80% of the biodiversity in each is gone, permanently.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @10:13PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @10:13PM (#571848)

        Yeah. The depth of the topsoil there is notoriously thin.
        The richness of the ecosystem is in the living organisms.
        Anything that dies and falls to the forest floor gets recycled in short order.
        It's relatively easy to negatively alter the ecosystem there and turn it into a desert--or at least a much less rich ecosystem.

        -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by HiThere on Friday September 22 2017, @04:35PM (1 child)

      by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Friday September 22 2017, @04:35PM (#571696) Journal

      Perhaps you couldn't tell, but you weren't an animal that had to live there. There are big differences between a young regrown forest and an old forest.

      That said, a regrown forest is a big improvement, and would, in time, become and old forest. I'm just saying that your impressions don't reflect actuality. In old forests there are lots of habitats that don't exist in new forests. E.g., many animals depend on flaws that develop in aging trees. And it's actually a lot more complex that I'm saying, or even know. E.g., if only drought tolerant trees survive, there are likely to be quite restricted food sources that may well be seasonal. It's a bit hard to live if you only have food 6 months out of the year. Even a three month dearth requires special adaptations, so, e.g., bears hibernate and primates developed an especially slow metabolism. (I don't think that there's a 3 month absence of food for an orangutan, but there are months of very short rations.)

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      • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @10:19PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @10:19PM (#571856)

        In old forests there are lots of habitats that don't exist in new forests

        ...and places that get clear-cut tend to then be replanted in a way that maximizes profits for the Capitalists.
        Genetic diversity be damned.
        Below, bob_super picks it up from there.

        -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

    • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday September 22 2017, @04:44PM (1 child)

      by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Friday September 22 2017, @04:44PM (#571699) Journal

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_old_growth_forests#United_States [wikipedia.org]

      A picture is worth a thousand words - http://www.foresthistory.org/ASPNET/Publications/region/8/crossett/images/fig2.jpg [foresthistory.org]

      Just ignore the apparent size of the trees - instead, look at the near absence of undergrowth. Unless you go to a park area in Arkansas, where the undergrowth is controlled, you won't find new growth forests that look like that. Old growth has a special sort of beauty.

      • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday September 22 2017, @10:13PM

        by bob_super (1357) on Friday September 22 2017, @10:13PM (#571845)

        On the undergrowth topic, humans eliminating the predators has a nasty side-effect: the herbivores eat all the undergrowth with impunity.
        I remember driving past Chicagoland forest preserves, where there are very few leaves below 6-7 feet, because the deer eat everything. The natural selection that should happen when you have nowhere to hide doesn't work.

    • (Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Friday September 22 2017, @06:27PM (3 children)

      by kurenai.tsubasa (5227) on Friday September 22 2017, @06:27PM (#571734) Journal

      The topic of what would happen and how long it would take after humans destroy themselves has always been fascinating to me. One of the things I wonder about is, if technological life were to evolve on this planet again (seems very likely in my mind), would they be able to figure out that they had been preceded by another technological species?

      There's a series that ran on TV and was a book, I believe, titled something like "The World After Us."

      Browsing Wikipedia, I found the book The World Without Us [wikipedia.org] and a documentary series Life After People [wikipedia.org]. Do those sound right?

      We like to think that humans are a plague that will destroy the Earth, but we're not. We're a blip on the Earth's timeline. The only thing humans can destroy is themselves and maybe take some species with them.

      One of the first post-apocalyptic books I read (got it off a bookmobile that went around town in the summer when I was a kid) was Earth Abides [wikipedia.org]. That's pretty much the theme of that book. It also attempted to ponder what restarting civilization might be like if there were human survivors here and there. The author hypothesizes that humans would return to a very primitive level of technology and education within 3 generations of the near extinction event.

      • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday September 22 2017, @06:53PM (1 child)

        by Phoenix666 (552) on Friday September 22 2017, @06:53PM (#571743) Journal

        Yes, those are the two. Thanks for looking that up.

        "A Canticle for Leibowitz" was another one on that theme. The most interesting take-away from that for me was the idea that technological civilization is not teleological, but cyclical. It's a provocative idea, especially when you cast back and wonder if other human civilizations like ours preceded us. The Romans had most of what we now have, and that was only a couple thousand years ago.

        Anatomically modern humans have been around for, what, 100,000 years? That means men and women just as intelligent as us were walking around for a long time before even the civilizations we know about. Could they have done as well, and we don't know about it because they built their cities next to the sea before its level rose? Ballard did, after all, find evidence of human habitation under the black sea that had to predate the mediterranean breaching the bosporus.

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        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @10:44PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @10:44PM (#571869)

          Going back even further, there's a lot of stories about the marvels of the Minoans on the north shore of Crete.
          Many think that they are what the Atlantis legend is all about.
          They got wiped out some time between 1642 and 1540 BCE in The Santorini Event. [wikipedia.org]
          (A powerful volcano caused a giant tsunami.)

          -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

      • (Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Friday September 22 2017, @07:06PM

        by Aiwendil (531) on Friday September 22 2017, @07:06PM (#571748) Journal

        would they be able to figure out that they had been preceded by another technological species?

        If it occurs within 500million years - yes. That roughly is how long it will take for the tectonic plates to recycle, and up until then any following civilisation will find odd breaks in ore-veins, and quite a few places where the geology doesn't match the mineral abundance. And before that they will find progressivly more and more remains.

        Beyond 500 million years - maybe stuff that we left on the moon and other low-atmospheric bodies.

  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 22 2017, @03:44PM (1 child)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday September 22 2017, @03:44PM (#571677)

    Chernobyl seemed to help the forest - not in and of itself, but by actually creating a no-go zone for humans that they respected.

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