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Before being colonised by the Vikings, Iceland was lush with forests but the fearsome warriors razed everything to the ground and the nation is now struggling to reforest the island.
The country is considered the least forested in Europe; indeed, forests in Iceland are so rare, or their trees so young, that people often joke that those lost in the woods only need to stand up to find their way.
However, it wasn't always that way.
When seafaring Vikings set off from Norway and conquered the uninhabited North Atlantic island at the end of the ninth century, forests, made up mostly of birch trees, covered more than a quarter of the island.
Within a century, the settlers had cut down 97 percent of the original forests to serve as building material for houses and to make way for grazing pastures.
The forests' recovery has been made all the more difficult by the active volcanoes, which periodically cover the soil with lava and ashes.
According to a report published in 2015 by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), forests now only cover 0.5 percent of the island's surface.
The lack of trees means there isn't any vegetation to protect the soil from eroding and to store water, leading to extensive desertification despite the country's far northern location.
[...]Reforestation efforts since the 1950s and especially the 1990s have helped the rocky landscape regain some of the greenery and efforts are ongoing.
In Hafnarsandur, a 6,000-hectare (14,800-acre) area of basalt and black sand in Iceland's southwest, authorities have tasked the Icelandic Forest Service with turning the lunar landscape into a forest.
"This is one of the worst examples of soil erosion in Iceland on low land," said Hreinn Oskarsson, the service's head of strategy.
Armed with a red "potti-putki", a Finnish designed tube-shaped tool, Oskarsson is planting lodgepole pines and Sitka spruces, two species of North American conifer trees, in an attempt to protect the nearby town of Thorlakshofn from recurring dust storms.
"We are planning an afforestation project to stabilise the soil," Oskarsson added.
[...]At the foot of Mount Esja, which overlooks the capital Reykjavik, is Mogilsa, where the Icelandic Forest Service's research division is located.
Next to the station is a 50 year-old planted forest where imported trees grow together with Iceland's only domestic tree, the birch.
Despite the birch being native to the soil, afforestation efforts often focus on other species of trees. The problem with birches, according to Adalsteinn Sigurgeirsson, deputy director of the forest service, is that they aren't a "productive species".
"So if you are going to meet other objectives, like fast sequestering of carbon or producing timber... we need more variety than just monocultures of one native species," he said.
[...]Dozens of nursery gardens have been set up throughout the country to facilitate the afforestation efforts.
[...]Since 2015, between three and four million trees have been planted in Iceland, the equivalent of about 1,000 hectares. That, however, is only a drop in the ocean compared to the six to seven million hectares planted in China over the same period.
See also: Forest Succession
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Sunday July 21 2019, @12:47AM (3 children)
http://iceland-nh.net/plants/data/Juniperus-communis/juniperus_communis.html [iceland-nh.net]
Juniper grows wild in Greenland. What if, instead of working so hard to get tall trees established, they took a different approach. Try to coax the juniper to stand upright, instead of spreading on the ground?
Have the juniper on Greenland always been spreading ground growth, or did it maybe stand upright before the Vikings? In nature there is a lot of interdependence. Maybe the taller trees depended on the juniper to provide relatively protected areas for the saplings to mature. And, the upright juniper depended on established groves of trees to protect them from the wind.
Ehhh, it's just an idea. Surely the biologists have thought of that?
(Score: 4, Funny) by driverless on Sunday July 21 2019, @09:17AM (1 child)
What about planting kudzu? The schedule would be something like this:
10:02am :Stamped on ground to warn it kudzu is coming.
10:08am: Planted kudzu.
10:12am: Watered kudzu with weedkiller and used crankcase oil.
10:18am: Kudzu growing vigorously.
10:39am: Phoned Reykjavik (distance 142km) to warn them that kuzdu was on its way.
10:52am: Got call back from Reykjavik that kuzdu had arrived.
11:09am: Good news: Aerial search located land that isn't covered in kudzu yet. Bad news: It's the main vent of Eyjafjallajökull.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday July 21 2019, @12:05PM
Pretty funny - but from what I can see, they have ground cover already that should be as effective as kudzu. What they are looking for are trees. Kudzu seems to go into direct competition with any and all living green stuff, except maybe frogs and insects. Still - I got a laugh!
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Sunday July 21 2019, @08:35PM
Probably not - scrub juniper doesn't become trees any more than scrub oak does - the scrub varieties have evolved to fill a different niche than their taller cousins.
Besides, juniper grows very slowly and is nasty stuff - it's a survivor, but it poisons the ground against most other plants growing nearby, only the hardiest (or co-evolved) plants will do well in their shade.
Most importantly, if they're trying to restore an old ecosystem which they know was thriving under their rather particular brand of harsh conditions, reintroducing the old trees is an important part of that. If there was a synergy with the juniper it will likely be reestablished. Between the volcanos and the extreme seasons from being so far north, I imagine there's a lot of room for interplay between a tall deciduous tree and an evergreen scrub.