#reforestation

Study Finds Rainforests Bounce Back Much Quicker than Expected

Text and image from this article in the New York Times:

Scientists once thought it would take a century or more for animals to return to deforested land in the tropics. Now, new research has found ecosystems can recover in mere decades. “It’s been a huge surprise for all of us,” said Timo Metz, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, and first author of the study, published in the journal Nature. “None of us expected it to be so impressive and so quick.” Rainforests have been disappearing at an alarming pace for at least a century, and millions of acres a year are still burned or cut down for logging, farming or ranching, or are lost to wildfires. In 2024, the rate of loss was as fast as 18 soccer fields per minute, adding up to an area nearly the size of Panama. At the same time, hundreds of millions of acres of formerly deforested land are thought to be regrowing. Scientists have generally found that it takes more than a century for trees and plants to fully resemble the old, original pristine forest. It was long assumed that animals would take just as long to return. The new study found that’s not necessarily the case. “The expectation was that the animals would need the forest to come first,” Dr. Metz said. “But surprisingly, many of the animals recover much more quickly than the trees.”

"A century of gradual reforestation across the American East and Southeast has kept the region cooler than it otherwise would have become, a new study shows.

The pioneering study of progress shows how the last 25 years of accelerated reforestation around the world might significantly pay off in the second half of the 21st century.

Using a variety of calculative methods and estimations based on satellite and temperature data from weather stations, the authors determined that forests in the eastern United States cool the land surface by 1.8 – 3.6°F annually compared to nearby grasslands and croplands, with the strongest effect seen in summer, when cooling amounts to 3.6 – 9°F.

The younger the forest, the more this cooling effect was detected, with forest trees between 20 and 40 years old offering the coolest temperatures underneath.

“The reforestation has been remarkable and we have shown this has translated into the surrounding air temperature,” Mallory Barnes, an environmental scientist at Indiana University who led the research, told The Guardian.

“Moving forward, we need to think about tree planting not just as a way to absorb carbon dioxide but also the cooling effects in adapting for climate change, to help cities be resilient against these very hot temperatures.”

The cooling of the land surface affected the air near ground level as well, with a stepwise reduction in heat linked to reductions in near-surface air temps.

“Analyses of historical land cover and air temperature trends showed that the cooling benefits of reforestation extend across the landscape,” the authors write. “Locations surrounded by reforestation were up to 1.8°F cooler than neighboring locations that did not undergo land cover change, and areas dominated by regrowing forests were associated with cooling temperature trends in much of the Eastern United States.”

By the 1930s, forest cover loss in the eastern states like the Carolinas and Mississippi had stopped, as the descendants of European settlers moved in greater and greater numbers into cities and marginal agricultural land was abandoned.

The Civilian Conservation Corps undertook large replanting efforts of forests that had been cleared, and this is believed to be what is causing the lower average temperatures observed in the study data.

However, the authors note that other causes, like more sophisticated crop irrigation and increases in airborne pollutants that block incoming sunlight, may have also contributed to the lowering of temperatures over time. They also note that tree planting might not always produce this effect, such as in the boreal zone where increases in trees are linked with increases in humidity that way raise average temperatures."

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1. Trust celebrates birth of rare lemur quadruplets

“The trust said red ruffed lemurs were only found in a small area of the northeast of Madagascar and were "critically endangered". It said the birth of quadruplets was incredibly rare, occurring in fewer than 6% of births worldwide. [...] It added alongside being part of the breeding programme, Shaldon Wildlife Trust directly supported the protection of the animals in the wild through their field conservation partner, the Lemur Conservation Association.”

2. Colorado Gov. Polis Signs New Conversion Therapy Ban, Defying Supreme Court

“The bill [...] allows survivors to sue the practitioners who subjected them to [conversion therapy], using a private right of action—notably, the same legal mechanism first pioneered by Republicans to get around Roe v. Wade in Texas. [...] Once it takes effect, it should immediately make conversion therapy financially prohibitive in the state, as any practitioner who engages in it faces unlimited civil liability with no statute of limitations on claims.”

3. A ‘Reforestation Pipeline’ in New Mexico Trains Seedlings to Survive in Burn Scars

“[First, researchers] find seeds from trees of various species that have already survived drought, wildfire or temperature extremes. [… Then, the nursery] toughens seedlings up so that they’re better prepared for the extreme conditions they’ll face outside[….] Toca and his team are exposing seedlings to controlled drought, which causes them to create a larger root system that can absorb more underground moisture[….]”

4. 8 crested ibises released in Japanese town decades after extinction in Japan

“The eight birds have been raised at a conservation center on Sado Island in the neighboring prefecture of Niigata following a successful captive-breeding program. Ten more birds are waiting to be released. [...] The birds went extinct on the Honshu main island in the 1970s[....] In 1999, artificial breeding by a pair donated from China successfully led to the first Japanese crested ibis chick born in captivity[....]”

5. Thanks to two new laws, more Virginians can save with community solar

“The legislation expands subscription-based solar farms from 250 to 875 megawatts[….] “You can tuck this [solar array] in a farmer’s back 40 where it can’t be seen from a road[….” and the income enables the farmers] to retire comfortably. […] The measures include allowing plug-in balcony solar units, reining in local restrictions on large solar farms, and pushing for better utilization of the state’s existing network of poles and wires.”

The Howgill Fells are a smooth, treeless cluster of hills in the Yorkshire Dales national park, so bald and lumpy that they are sometimes described as a herd of sleeping elephants. Their bare appearance – stark even by UK standards – has been shaped by centuries of sheep grazing. Yet beneath the soil lie ancient tree roots: the silent traces of long-lost “ghost woodlands”.

Now, these woodlands are being encouraged to grow again. Over the past 12 years, 300,000 native trees have been planted across these hills in sheep-free enclosures. The results are beginning to be seen: birds and flowers are returning.

[...]

John Capstick, chair of the Ravenstonedale Common Graziers Association, which hosts 187 hectares (462 acres) of fenced off land, says at first some farmers “were dead against it being fenced off. They were frightened it was an ulterior motive to get sheep off the fell.” Now, “there is the odd one who still whines,” but most are happy, he says.

In fact, the trees are not proving a threat to hill farming. The money is a lifeline for farmers, who earn as little as £7,500 a year from selling sheep and have been reliant on disappearing government subsidies. The Tebay scheme provides payments of £25,600 a year for maintaining the trees and fences and for loss of grazing rights, which are shared equally between the landowner and the farmers.

When Stockholm’s Traffic Office conducted a general assessment of street traffic in the Swedish capital in 2001, it came to the shocking conclusion that two-thirds of all trees in the city center were dead or dying.

City authorities agreed that an urgent response was needed to nurse these leafy urban ecosystem pillars back to health.

Enter Björn Embrén, Stockholm’s first “tree officer.”

Under his leadership, various technologies and materials were tested in an attempt to create a more suitable living space for trees in the urban environment.

“I knew that they could grow if the circumstances were right,” says Embrén, a former professional gardener.

“It’s like putting a plastic bag over your head and tightening it over your neck,” says Embrén. “That’s what happened to the trees in Stockholm. They were dying.”

Eventually, inspired by railroad embankments — which require only a small amount of organic matter for healthy trees to grow — Embrén concocted what was to become known as the “Stockholm tree pit” model.

By 2002, Embrén had drawn up designs. And by 2003, they were already building.

The design involves digging a pit and constructing a frame underground around the tree’s roots, and then filling said pit with a mixture of soil and stone, sometimes including biochar, to both aerate and fertilize the soil. These permeable layers are very strong and physically adaptable but also allow stormwater to flow in, meaning the trees are provided with sufficient air and water naturally. They also allow rainwater to be soaked up — a necessity amid more extreme weather brought on by climate change.

In the global effort to combat climate change, large-scale, plant-based strategies such as planting forests and cultivating biofuels are an increasingly important part of countries' plans to reduce their overall carbon emissions, but a study in the journal Science finds that well-intended strategies could have unforeseen impacts on biodiversity and that, in general, restoring forests has the most beneficial effect on wildlife. The study is titled "Variable impacts of land-based climate mitigation on habitat area for vertebrate diversity." The authors, including New York Botanical Garden (NYBG) Assistant Curator Evelyn Beaury, Ph.D., argue that policy makers and conservation officials should consider impacts on biodiversity when evaluating the most effective tools to mitigate climate change.