This year is the worst start to the wildfire season in the past decade. More than 3,737 square miles (9,679 square kilometers) have burned across the U.S., almost triple the 10-year average.
With no shortage of burn scars around the West, researchers and private groups such as The Nature Conservancy have been tapping New Mexico State University's center for seedlings to learn how best to restore forests after the flames are extinguished.
The center has provided sprouts for projects in New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Utah, Texas and California, but experts said its capacity for turning out as many as 300,000 seedlings annually isn't enough now and certainly won't be in the future as climate change and drought persist.
[...] If the West wants to keep its forests, policymakers need to think about it in economic terms that would have significant benefits for water supplies, recreation and the rural and tribal communities that hold these mountain landscapes sacred, said Collin Haffey, forest and watershed health coordinator with the New Mexico Forestry Division.
Are direct human interventions like re-planting after forest fires enough to hold back climate change?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 27 2022, @09:00PM (4 children)
I don't know if anyone knows what "enough" looks like, but almost anything and everything useful will help.
Less cutting trees and greens will help hugely. Some plants are damaging / invasive and need to be cut early and often. I hate seeing trees chopped, mangled, and cut down entirely to make way for overhead electrical lines. Invest in buried lines. It can be done, it has been done, and it should be the only way forward.
Solar panels, wind generators, insulation, effective recycling, somehow cutting way down on plastics (unless they are truly recyclable, meaning, in an economically viable way).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 27 2022, @10:21PM
Yay for HVDC [wikipedia.org].
If you do it in AC, the capacitance losses are horrendous.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 28 2022, @02:26AM (1 child)
Climate change is occurring at a rate that is unprecedented in the geological record. Trees and most plants migrate very slowly. Maybe we can speed this migration up by seeding burn areas with species that historically have occupied areas further south (in N. hemisphere; opposite for S. hemisphere). These may become "invasive" in the new territory, but are more likely to survive than the species historically there. Some animals can migrate quickly IF there are corridors not infested with human activity for them to travel. We need to create these corridors to connect old and new habitats too.
Yes, this assisted migration is risky. But, it may reduce the number of species we eliminate during the current Anthropocene extinction.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday May 28 2022, @04:34AM
We need to be thinking about changing our cropping (mono)culture too. It's time to start planting tepary beans, teff, black fonio, and maybe sorghum en masse in this country. All of those are much more drought-tolerant than our standard staple crops; the teparies in particular used to be planted in dry gullies after a single rainfall and would still sprout.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday May 29 2022, @04:04PM
I don't think the trees care much whether they are cut down for overhead lines or for buried lines.
While that certainly would help the environment, I'm not sure it would help the climate (it depends on how much carbon is produced when producing the replacement). Note that the durability of plastics means that its carbon is kept out of the atmosphere for a long time.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Ken_g6 on Saturday May 28 2022, @05:55AM
That's the wrong question. The answer to that question is obviously no. If we don't stop climate change we lose forests and a whole lot more.
The right question is, how much desertification can we stop with interventions like re-planting after forest fires? Culling a lot of trees is probably necessary to keep fires from jumping tree-to-tree so much. Carefully controlled burns would help too. This and culling in an aesthetically pleasing way would require big increases to forest service budgets. And they won't stop tree deaths from drought or from bark beetles.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 28 2022, @02:16PM (1 child)
into unsustainable wars and military expansion.
Don't worry about the climate for now.
/sarcasm
(Score: 3, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Sunday May 29 2022, @04:08PM
We have to fight climate change. Of course we need more military, they are the experts in fighting, after all!
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.