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, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @12:51PM (1 child)
FTFS "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."
So either they discovered that drought resistant species do better in drought conditions or adding soil amendments helped but there was no difference in result of the various different ones they tried.
I haven't read the paper but one of these results is useful the other is capt. obvious thanks for your usual clear and concise prose phys org
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 22 2017, @03:12PM
I think what TFS is saying is: soil amendments help if you only look at short term survival. Once you get out to 5 years (or whatever the term of the study was) the soil amendments no longer provide any differentiation.
In other words: in the long run the soil amendments tested did nothing - even though you could see short term benefits.
I suspect that continuing care might have made a long term difference, but they didn't test that, they tested one-shot soil amendments at the time of planting.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bradley13 on Friday September 22 2017, @01:05PM (13 children)
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...
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday September 22 2017, @02:47PM (10 children)
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.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @03:56PM (1 child)
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
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)
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.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @10:19PM
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)
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
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)
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.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 22 2017, @03:44PM (1 child)
Chernobyl seemed to help the forest - not in and of itself, but by actually creating a no-go zone for humans that they respected.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @11:33PM
I do wish people would stop spewing this nonsense.
The Chernobyl event absolutely poisoned the surrounding ecosystem.
Tim Mousseau PhD (biosciences) and Anders Moller MD have done extensive studies of the area.
Wildlife Around Chernobyl Is Still Affected 30 Years After The Catastrophe [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [theregister.co.uk]
birds and rodents show elevated frequencies and degree of cataracts
birds showed diminished brain size, increased incidence of tumor formation, reduced fertility, and more malformed offspring
barn swallows nearly died out
Wild populations would be locally extinct if it were not for constant immigration
dead vegetation was not being eaten by insects in the usual way
beetles and other wood eaters are less prevalent
Vegetation is not rotting and nutrients are not being returned to the soil.
The ecosystem around Chernobyl is a mess.
20MB [tucradio.org] 25 minute[1] audio presentation by Tim Mousseau.
[1] Perhaps even less if your media player has a speedup capability--especially if it has an anti-chipmunk feature.
Wildlife Around Chernobyl Is -NOT- Plentiful -nor- Are The Remaining Animals Healthy (Birds, Bees, Butterflies) [washingtonsblog.com]
Chernobyl & Fukushima Studies Show That Radiation Reduces Animal & Plant Numbers, Fertility, Brain Size, & Biological Diversity And Increases Deformities & Abnormalities [dissidentvoice.org]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Ayn Anonymous on Friday September 22 2017, @01:06PM
Permaculture Greening the Desert
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xcZS7arcgk [youtube.com]
(Score: 2) by datapharmer on Friday September 22 2017, @02:23PM (3 children)
And the tree species that did well were?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday September 22 2017, @04:07PM (2 children)
I don't know what they planted, but if they tried gumtrees (eucalyptus species), they are truly and properly fucked.
The gum trees are doing well in pretty tough conditions and nothing else will grow beside them. Eg blue gum (originated from Tasmania) is considered invasive species [kcet.org] in California.
Ah, yes, something more: eucalyptus love forests fire - they survive pretty well to fire and a clean ground to expand after the fire is just perfect to them. The eucalyptus oils they emanate in warm weather help spread that fire faster.
Here's [soundofcritters.com] how the gum trees look like a year after a forest fire equiv to 1500 Hiroshima bombs [smh.com.au]
Even more: once an eucalyptus forest establishes, expect an explosion in the Thylarctos plummetus population. If that's the case, the only hope for human survival in the area is Vegemite - apply generously behind the ears.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @08:39PM (1 child)
It's like Australia was where they put all the shit animals and plants that don't get along well with others. And the people too, for that matter.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday September 23 2017, @12:05AM
Yea... naaaah mate. Those people seem to have found America more to their taste.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Friday September 22 2017, @06:59PM (3 children)
Every time I see someone saying "Save the Trees" I can't help but think... They literally grow on trees.
Let's "Save" something that doesn't.
Let's work on planting trees to offset the ones we harvest, or die natural deaths? Yes, let's.
But let's don't "Save the Trees." I firmly believe we're smarter than that.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Saturday September 23 2017, @02:51AM (2 children)
Sure, harvest the trees, but let's be a bit smarter than replanting them as monoculture row crops. Somehow it seems all "scientific and smart" to optimize financial yields by producing the most board-feet-per-acre-year of land, but that's incredibly short sighted and risky, as compared to restoration of a natural ecosystem with diversity.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Saturday September 23 2017, @11:56AM (1 child)
Whether you are optimizing for board-feet or ecosystem restoration, you are doing some good (just to widely varying degrees). I'm old enough to remember when those ubiquitous grocery bags were made of paper, and were rectangular; no plastic grocery bags extant. But the "save the trees" contingent helped usher in the switch to plastic, thereby "saving" trees.
My objection then as now was that trees grow back. And, in this example, petroleum for plastics doesn't.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday September 23 2017, @02:05PM
Saving the trees or not, plastic grocery bags are lighter weight, lower volume (of material, per unit grocery carried), easier to handle (they actually have handles), and they rot in the landfills just the same.
🌻🌻 [google.com]