How to Plant the Forests of the Future | Hacker News Reader

How to Plant the Forests of the Future

worldsensorium.com

43 pointsnautilus11 comments

Not one mention of succession. If you’re starting what we already know to be a multigenerational project, then what matters is not what are the “right” trees to grow but what are the right trees to grow to get more trees, and the right trees to grow to get more carbon in the ground. So that’s succession pathways and growing soil by focusing on the soil food web.

From that perspective something like alder or other short-lived tree may be better. They flame out and die young, and then you can seed trees that like to grow on nurse logs, things like hemlock, which will refill the canopy and help keep the process going. Then you plant the monster trees that you see in a mature forest. If you let this happen organically it will of course take longer, but you can nudge things along by planting in clearings instead of waiting a lucky germination, cull trees in areas where they the pioneer trees are doing too well, reintroduce understory plants and other wildlife, microbes, etc.

IMO this is a terrible idea. Humans love to try to engineer things and wind up mucking things up sticking their fingers in it. Think of all the invasive deliberately introduced species worldwide. In some cases it worked out, but the results were not predictable, in most cases it caused unforseen problems usually as bad as or worse than the one people were trying to solve.

> Currently voluntary for foresters, transferring seedlings in anticipation of future climate conditions will soon become mandatory.

Think of this: those forests that are there, when the climate was different before there were probably different sorts of plants, no? I'm not talking millions of years ago, I'm talking ten thousand years ago, way too short of a timeframe for evolution. So how did those plants get there?

The answer is clear, either the trees that are there are more adaptable than we give them credit for, or the seeds were winding up there but didn't germinate until climate changed to the conditions they needed.

Either way no intervention is necessary.

So why don't we just let it happen naturally the way it always has? Why do some people think a solution to (pardon my French) putting your dick in the pudding is to put your dick in the pudding some more? Maybe quit digging the hole and leave shit alone?

I disagree. The climate has been warmer/drier/wetter/etc in the past, but the rate of change is really high right now. We need to work to get out in front of it. There's a risk that the engineered solution won't work well, but the alternative is a guarantee that habitats will be gone and biodiversity will take a huge hit, taking a really long time to recover.

> Think of this: those forests that are there, when the climate was different before there were probably different sorts of plants, no? I'm not talking millions of years ago, I'm talking ten thousand years ago, way too short of a timeframe for evolution. So how did those plants get there?

Forests migrate during slow natural climate change. The current climate change is much faster. If we wait and let it happen naturally, it will take a very long time, but we need to be soaking up carbon now, and it needs to be held by trees that will survive as long as possible in the currently-changing climate.

I feel like this is an emergency brake type of deal. We need something fast.

Another aspect of getting in front of it is that forests make their own weather. An ecosystem has a microclimate, and when you remove it the microclimate shifts much faster than the climate does. The empty field they are eyeballing for a forest is going to be a much harder prospect for the native trees than an intact forest will be.

This is especially true of temperate forests, and temperate forests are, according to current understanding, the ones that sequester by far the most carbon. It’s partly to do with the soil being fungally dominant. Fungal soils also create their own weather, but they can’t do so if it gets too hot and dry or too tropical. The longer we wait to do something the less land there is to start a temperate forest.

After much fanfare near the beginning of the article about tackling climate change, part way into this it mentions the trees reaching maturity and indirectly that they can then be successfully logged. Which means such plantings are little more than a note in the margin as far as tackling climate change is concerned. If you're not securing the continued sequestration of that carbon either as standing trees or burying it then it ends up back in the atmosphere again and the net benefit is zero.

Frustratingly this seems to be a common flaw in lots of talk about reforesting. The NZ billion trees initiative is similar, once you get into the details it turns out to be little more than a continuation and scaling up of commercial forestry.

Though, logging itself isn't releasing all of that carbon (though it's likely worse because of diesel, water and energy in milling) - the wood doesn't all go up in smoke the day it comes down, it often goes into construction that has a meaningful life of 50 more years.

Burying it and letting it rot would release the carbon. Logging it and turning it into lumber delays that process a lot longer.

There's research into this. Release to atmosphere from buried logs is minimal if done with that aim in mind: https://cbmjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1750-0...

It's not onerous either, a hectare of trees can be sequestered in a 25m2 pit.

Alternatively you can biochar it and then interr, but more labour and time intensive with the extra steps.

The charcoal will contain at most half of the carbon, the other half goes up in smoke. You could do cogeneration with that but now you need a plant nearby or heavy transportation which likely won’t be carbon negative. And the more you process it the more extractive the process is, and the we need something that isn’t extractive.

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