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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?
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Friday September 22 2017, @06:27PM (3 children)
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?
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?
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)
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.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @10:44PM
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
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.