The accepted belief is that once destroyed, tropical rain forests could never be restored. But is that really the case or just a myth?
In 1993, researchers from the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Sciences at Cornell University began replanting a parcel of worn-out Costa Rican pasture land with seeds collected from native trees found in the community, often racing to gather the seeds before the monkeys got to them.
The result? Many people thought that they had done the impossible:
In 1993, researchers from the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Sciences at Cornell University began replanting a parcel of worn-out Costa Rican pasture land with seeds collected from native trees found in the community, often racing to gather the seeds before the monkeys got to them.
The result? Many people thought that they had done the impossible:
Ten years after the tree plantings, Cornell graduate student Jackeline Salazar counted the species of plants that took up residence in the shade of the new planted areas. She found remarkably high numbers of species -- more than 100 in each plot. And many of the new arrivals were also to be found in nearby remnants of the original forests. [...]
Fully rescuing a rain forest may take hundreds of years, but Leopold, whose findings are published with Salazar in the March 2008 issue of Ecological Restoration, said the study's results are promising. "I'm surprised," he said. "We're getting impressive growth rates in the new forest trees."
Link - via holeinthedonut
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by baweibel.
Atleast someone is trying to do something. :/
I mean, we're doing our best to trample it, but does anybody doubt that within a couple hundred years of humanity's extinction, nature will be all, "Who?"
Good article though.
I've always thought it's human hubris to imagine mankind's impact on nature as irreversible. This goes for climate change too.
Saehn-- I agree with you, especially concerning rare species, but still, at least trying to restore the rain forest is better than doing nothing.
Several years ago, I started noticing this "rain forest" garbage. The only thing I can guess is that it is a "politically correct" term, invented to replace "jungle." Maybe the latter word always made some ultra-leftist whiners think of the phrase, "the jungles of darkest Africa," conjuring up (in their sick minds) an idea of wild, pagan, dark-skinned cannibals. But we can't have that, you see ...!
Not all regions called "jungles" would qualify as "rain forests" because many would apply "jungle" to the forests of northern Thailand or southern Guangdong in China: but scientifically, these are "monsoon forests" or "tropical deciduous forests" but not "rain forests".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jungle
@mmm - do you call it a "temperate jungle" or a "temperate rain forest"? (also, what other old un-PC terms have you kept/abandoned)
I don't know if a racial connotation is the reason, but "rain forest" sure sounds like re-branding