SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Freshwater fish diversity is harmed as much by selective logging in rainforests as they are by complete deforestation, according to a new study.
Researchers had expected the level of damage would rise depending on the amount of logging and were surprised to discover the impact of removing relatively few trees.
[...] Lead author Clare Wilkinson, from the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial, said: "That such a small change can impact fish biodiversity is shocking and worrying. We expected to see a gradient from least affected in the selectively logged areas, to heavily impacted for the streams in oil palm plantations. Instead, we saw almost the same level of fish biodiversity loss in all altered environments."
[...] Researchers believe the reasons for these dramatic changes are likely to be down to a range of factors that affect stream habitats when trees are lost. Trees provide shade, creating cooler patches of stream that many fish need to spawn. Older, taller trees provide more of this shade, but they are the ones usually removed in selective logging. Leaf litter from these trees also helps to keep the streams cool and to concentrate food sources.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Saturday April 21 2018, @02:50PM (1 child)
I suppose that everyone knows that the tree they can see, is only half of the tree? There is as much tree beneath the ground, as there is above the ground. Not only does an ancient tree crowd out competition for sunlight, it's also crowding out competition for water and minerals. If the tree reaches 100 feet into the air, and spreads spreads out over 500 sq ft of ground - it's just about that large beneath the surface.
So, cutting down that one gargantuan tree may have more of an impact than cutting dozens, or even hundreds, of saplings and juvenile trees.
Don't count the trees. Instead, measure the cubic area occupied by the tree to estimate the impact on the ecosphere.
Or, another way to look at it, for you environmental change folk: How many tons of carbon are sequesterd in that tree? Twenty tons of carbon are more valuable than five tons, right?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 21 2018, @02:59PM
A childhood friend became a "sustainable logger" in the north east USA. One of his policies was to leave the very largest trees (as long as they were not diseased or otherwise failing), since they were likely to reproduce more healthy, long living trees.