"Thus do the causes - direct or indirect - proliferate, a growing list of human actions that so modify the natural environment that tree death and forest decline eventuate: too much ground-levi ozone and not enough stratospheric ozone; acidified soils over vast forest regions; a pattern of nutrient loss and an excess of other nutrients, such as nitrogen, that prove toxic; the deposition of heavy metals - cadmium, lead, copper, zinc, mercury - and the mobility of poisonous aluminum normally locked in the soil; the loss of beneficial mycorrhizal fungus; the destructive edge effects from clear-cutting, and the modification of forest composition from a century of overcasting; the genetic weakness of replacement trees in impacted ecosystems; a host of plagues and diseases anxious to take advantage of the debilitated trees and forests; the unwonted effects of too-rapid climate change. And this by no means exhausts the list of possible, and perhaps probable, anthropogenic impacts on trees and forests." ~Charles E. Little #foresthero #forest #ecology #trees #nature #conservation (at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania)
