Burned-Out Forests Are Not Re-Growing
dissidentvoice.org
dissidentvoice.org
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21100767-venado-decl...
shout out to SKYLAB Precision Forestry who are doing excellent, cutting edge work based in Hamburg, Germany
> Even after 15 years post-fire, 80% of the surveyed plots contained no new trees.
> From 1900 to 2015 the world lost more than a third of its old-growth forests.
We are going to quite literally burn this planet to the ground before the end of the century.
> Even after 15 years post-fire, 80% of the surveyed plots contained no new trees.
So 20% did, why?
> Global warming has contributed to a doubling of the number of acres burned across the country since the 1990s.
While I agree that climate change is real, so is mismanagement of our forests. Which is to blame most?
Frankly, the use of the phrase Global Warming (instead of the more accurate and more accepted Climate Change) makes we suspect of the strength of the argument.
Part of the reason for the current state of things is mismanagement through blanket fire prevention. Another part is things like pine beetle in colorado and new mexico killing millions of acres of trees because of warmer temperatures associated with climate change, and that wood drying out for years in the desert air.
One of the primary scalable ways to fix the atmosphere is to use oceanic bio CSS by growing gigatons of kelp and/or phytoplankton, and sinking it to where it's more-or-less permanently sequestered. Floating automated kelp farms and processing stations could make this happen.
"When trees fail to regenerate after a fire, new plants take their place. To generalize, in the northern Rocky Mountains, it’s a mix of grasses and shrubs of the genus ceanothus — like snowbrush. In parts of the Southwest, juniper and oak savannas replace pine forests. In New Mexico, thorny locusts often dominate. In northern California, its dense hip to head-high thickets of manzanita and ceanothus. The general trend: fewer forests, more shrublands."
(also, https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2021/07/19/california-fir...)
If we don't know, we can study how far away an 'island' of trees can be from an intact stand and still draw mammals, birds, insects, pollen, spores, etc, across different terrains, watersheds, and seasonal winds. The animals bring plants with them, and we can 'hire' them just like plants do, if we set up the same kinds of incentives.
There was a video I watched years ago that I lament not making a bookmark for. In a restoration in SE Asia they factored bird services into the equation. They planted a handful of species of plants that the birds liked for forage, and then waited for the birds to bring in other fruits on their own. At the time I think they were looking at around 2x as many species as they had planted, and I believe they expected that to continue as the forage season was expanded by each new plant that arrived.
For example, California has lost ~26% of its forest cover since 2000 https://www.globalforestwatch.org/map/country/USA/5/?mainMap...
Tree cover gain - 2001-2012
Tree cover loss - 2001-2020
These are not even close to the same period length. They don't seem to have an actually comparable option in their choices.
So what I'm saying is that we won't even have been the first species to have done so.
It does sound contradictory when said like this imo. Isn't plant growth the whole point of a greenhouse?
Uh, no. Egypt was desert when the Pyramids were built. Egyptian civilization existed (and still does) in a narrow ribbon along the Nile; the Pyramids of Giza are only about five miles from it. They're certainly not in the middle of nowhere, that's just the camera angles working. (See https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/94/Giza-pyr... for an alternative view.)
Pictures of the Pyramid of Djoser (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2e/Saqqara_...) look like it's in the middle of nowhere, but it's four miles from the Nile, too, and only two thousand feet away from fertile farmland.
Meidum? Again, four miles from the Nile and 800 feet from farms, despite photos looking like https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/81/02_meidu....
Could be that we were just wrong about how quickly growth restarts after a fire.
Logging practices over the past two hundred years have had big impacts on how the forest ecology works: what trees grow, what animals and insects live there and how much floor litter there is. All of this has an impact on whether a fire comes through and sterilizes the soil or leaves it fertile.
There was immense pressure for the forest service to support logging and grazing, both of which dramatically alter the landscape.
Another complication is that the native Americans in the area had their own silviculture practice that optimized for their own needs (by and large not lumber), so pre-white historical guides aren’t necessarily “natural” either.
So the forests always regrew, but then we changed them (and stopped allowing fires). In the meanwhile the environment changed as we pumped more carbon into the atmosphere. Now when we reintroduce fire the results are different.
The fire intensities are much higher due to various factors. This kills more of the mature trees and alters the soil nutrient composition such that it become water repellent.
The same effects have been noted in Australian mega-fires over the past decade.
Under your given time span of “hundreds of millions of years” I assume essentially square inch of land underwent desertification at some point, if it wasn’t buried beneath the sea. I mean, there weren’t even trees before 385 million years ago.
That may not be the unalloyed good news it's portrayed as, especially where forests are concerned.
None of the citations or claims in this article look reputable.
If you think crypto is a bubble, then the resource game was the first of its kind. Promise of riches for all that end up getting funneled into the pockets of a few at the expense of all others is the name of progress.
The largest most profitable companies in this world exploit nature & poor communities, turning them into money and influence with alarming efficency.
This isn't to say one shouldn't take care of their body, I go to the gym 2-3 times and a week and do lots of cycling.
The fact about how many old trees have died in the last century saddens me in a peculiar way.
Is the climate bad now? The human population is at its peak, living standards are way better than ever, so it would seem that the current climate is just fine (for humans at least).
https://www.noaa.gov/news/2020-was-earth-s-2nd-hottest-year-...
We also have known for some time that forests heal faster from the edges in, and as we've learned more about what goes on below the soil the evidence just stacks up for it. Unprescribed fires aren't just more intense, they're also bigger. We are going to have to start factoring all of this into our land management practices, and apply it to any restoration work.