Amazon drought: 'We've never seen anything like this'
Amazon drought: 'We've never seen anything like this'
This year's heat and drought in the Amazon intensify worries that it is approaching a tipping point.
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The Amazon is a planted forest, it is looking more and more like it will need aggressive planting to keep it healthy. We should support the indigenous Amazonian in this work for all our sake.
There's lots of evidence of domestication, cultivation, tending over the last 13,000+ years. But calling it a "planted forest" - like as if the majority of plants out in the Amazon were seeded/planted manually by humans - seems like a huge stretch.
According to this paper, about 1/5 by people
Ok, but that's still really far off from being a "planted forest".
There probably different zones, deeper ones are natural and authentic, zones at the borders will be mostly planted.
Its probably fair to call the amazon a collection of forests and other biomes rather then “a forest” but i am no ecologist so don’t quote me on that.
Other countries should also be looking at adding forest area and wetlands in a strategic fashion to improve freshwater retention. Deforesting clearly changes local climates. So we should be able to do the reverse as well.
Historical accounts make it sound like the vast majority of land east of the Mississippi in the US used to be old growth forest. Between the chestnut blight and over 200 years of logging, most of the old growth forest is gone.
India has had some notable successes with a grassroots movement to get rural communities to do small earthworks projects to colllect water during the rainy season and let it seep into the ground. They have demonstrated a notable reduction in crop failures during the dry season resulting from the community action.