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"Inside a greenhouse at her Tahoe City field station, Maloney shows off a sea of young green trees in their own containers. These 10,000 sugar pine seedlings gr
by dpflan 7y ago
"Inside a greenhouse at her Tahoe City field station, Maloney shows off a sea of young green trees in their own containers. These 10,000 sugar pine seedlings grew from seeds Maloney and her team collected from 100 of the surviving sugar pines."
This is interesting; seems like artificial and natural selection combined. It does seem to solve the current problem, but what would be the implications? Aren't the dying trees beneficial to the ecosystem in some way (clearly they are food for the pine beetles, which are food for other animals...)?
- hinkley 7y agoA typical problem with invasive species is that their predators don’t also make the trip. It’s not a given that anything is eating them, micro or macro. Dead wood left on the forest floor can help improve soil quality and water retention though, and the decay microbes and invertebrates do have their own food chain that goes as high as foxes and bears. It’s an old idea we haven’t practiced much, in part because of misguided fire suppression, and miscategorizing it as waste, instead of fodder.
- pstuart 7y agoThe blocker being the contingent that considers the forests as nothing more than a potential strip-mine, being that said contingent has the reins currently.