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Burned-Out Forests Are Not Re-Growing
- threatofrain 5y ago> A University of Colorado/Boulder study shows that when forests burn across significant portions of the Rocky Mountains, the forests do not regrow. Even after 15 years post-fire, 80% of the surveyed plots contained no new trees.
- TigeriusKirk 5y agoWhat's the expected percentage of regrowth plots after 15 years?
- chiefalchemist 5y agoThe article was thin on such details. > 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.
- yummypaint 5y agoAfter a normal fire trees begin regrowing immediately, and many trees survive. The fires weve been having are in forests choked with dead fuel, so they burn extremely hot and kill absolutely everything including the soil. There is supposed the be a mycelial network and microorganisms and seeds left in place after a fire. 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.
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y agoSooo for the last few hundereds of millions of years, which included a much warmer periods than the current one, trees somehow always managed to regrow, and chose this very moment to cease doing it?
- marginalia_nu 5y ago10,000 years ago, what is presently the Sahara desert was green and had forests.
- labster 5y agoYeah, but GP said hundreds of millions of years ago. Were there trees in the Gondwanaland Sahara?
- monkeybutton 5y agoAre you suggesting that the researchers are lying? Or that they are so incompetent that they cannot accurately measure what they are claiming?
- __MatrixMan__ 5y agoCould be that it's something other than temperature. Soil chemistry stuff, fewer insects than before, etc. Could be that we were just wrong about how quickly growth restarts after a fire.
- ceejayoz 5y agoWould it be that shocking for the first ever species to spew enormous amounts of heavy metals and other pollutants into the atmosphere and waters to have stressed the world’s forests in a new way?
- AnimalMuppet 5y agoKind of? It would be somewhat more shocking than trees not re-growing because of drier conditions, which is where the article goes.
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- Aaronstotle 5y agoI experienced the brutal heat wave that hit the Bay Area in 2020, along with awful wildfires and started smoking 1 cigarette a day. My thinking was, if the climate is this bad now (2020), it's going to be significantly worse by 2050. 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.
- FartyMcFarter 5y ago> if the climate is this bad now (2020) 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).
- roughly 5y agoIt’s worse than it was 5 years ago. I’ve lived in the bay for ~15 years now, you did not used to need air filters for ~several weeks to months out of the year.
- r00fus 5y agoWhat happens when the clathrate gun fires and we look at exponential temperature increase?
- FartyMcFarter 5y agoThat's not happening in 2020 right? We were talking about the current climate.
- Aaronstotle 5y agoMy original point about the climate was referencing the warming effect and extrapolating that out another 20-30 years. https://www.noaa.gov/news/2020-was-earth-s-2nd-hottest-year-just-behind-2016 https://www.noaa.gov/news/2020-was-earth-s-2nd-hottest-year-...
- syki 5y ago
- mistrial9 5y agothis is true for the Western Sierra mountains also.. but a big catch is, the Western Sierras and the Eastern Colorado Rockies are carefully studied by competent people with excellent equipment, while vast stretches of northern forests in other parts of the world, are similarly suffering (fires) but with very little detail available. Geopolitics interferes as the political governments are rivals. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21100767-venado-declaration 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
- m0llusk 5y agoMuch of the Western US is currently experiencing a megadrought. Forests don't regrow without rain.
- beervirus 5y ago> a radical newsletter in the struggle for peace and social justice None of the citations or claims in this article look reputable.
- culi 5y agoScience is a journal that has been around for over a hundred years and had an impact factor of 41.845 in 2019. Seems pretty reputable to me
- weq 5y agoSuch is the times we live in. The world is literly burning down, and taking out the coral and oceans with it and there will still be people citing the doctrine of Resource extracting industries that they are not to blame. 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.
- refurb 5y agoThe Lancet was reputable at one point too. Now, not so much.
- kpennell 5y agoThis site allows you to see the amount of forest gained/lost in different regions over the last 20 years: https://www.globalforestwatch.org/map/?map=eyJjZW50ZXIiOnsibGF0IjoyNi45OTk5OTk5OTk5OTk5NzUsImxuZyI6LTI5LjMwODU5Mzc0OTk5OTM5Mn19 https://www.globalforestwatch.org/map/?map=eyJjZW50ZXIiOnsib... For example, California has lost ~26% of its forest cover since 2000 https://www.globalforestwatch.org/map/country/USA/5/?mainMap=eyJzaG93QW5hbHlzaXMiOnRydWV9&map=eyJjZW50ZXIiOnsibGF0Ijo1My4zODMzMjgzNjc1NTc0MSwibG5nIjotMTE2LjYzMDg1OTM3NTAwNDM1fSwiem9vbSI6Mi43Mzg4MjU5MzYxOTE3NjgsImNhbkJvdW5kIjpmYWxzZX0%3D https://www.globalforestwatch.org/map/country/USA/5/?mainMap...
- simonsarris 5y agoIt seems somewhat disingenuous to have a map with the two overlays: 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.
- seltzered_ 5y agorelated: https://grist.org/climate/climate-change-forest-loss/ https://grist.org/climate/climate-change-forest-loss/ "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-fires-fire-advisor-wildfires/ideas/essay/ https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2021/07/19/california-fir...)
- hinkley 5y agoI think we are going to have to put more wood behind fewer arrowheads by concentrating human restoration effort on quality over quantity. More intensely restoring tree cover to smaller areas, strategically chosen not just for convenience (access) but also for how and where it can spread on its own. Trees together collaborate on building forest, especially if there are a few older trees to serve as figurative scaffolding. 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.
- hinkley 5y agoThere's been some talk about how the 'sustainable forestry' practices we've been doing are going to reveal themselves to have been a fiction after the next lumber harvest. I can't help but think this is showing up now in the results, and global warming has accomplices. 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.
- mistrial9 5y agototally agree about the soil health and (implied) biodiversity in regeneration. Unfortunately, some recent studies show that heavy herbicide applications improve the tree growth in the near (10 year) term. Lots of companies (Bayer/US/Planet) want to sell herbicides and genetically engineered solutions. (sad face)
- marstall 5y agoand yet https://www.warpnews.org/human-progress/nasa-the-earth-is-greener-now-than-it-was-20-years-ago/ https://www.warpnews.org/human-progress/nasa-the-earth-is-gr...
- ceejayoz 5y agoThat article credits, in part, "intensive agriculture" in China and India. That may not be the unalloyed good news it's portrayed as, especially where forests are concerned.
- shakezula 5y ago> Global warming has contributed to a doubling of the number of acres burned across the country since the 1990s. > 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.
- errcorrectcode 5y agoBiomes are changing and it's our fault. Planting trees won't virtual signal our way out of climate change when there's too much CO2 in the air, not enough rain, and too much heat. If I hear any more about planting trees somehow magically sequestering carbon, I'm going to scream into the void until my eyes bleed. 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.