No net loss of wetlands was government policy starting back in the days of George H.W. Bush. It sounds like a good policy or perhaps the best compromise. The goals were, “to balance wetland loss due to economic development with wetlands reclamation, mitigation, and restorations efforts, so that the total acreage of wetlands in the country does not decrease, but remains constant or increases.” The mitigation part has been less than successful. That part of the policy was go ahead build another strip mall, office park or sub-division but just create some lake-like wetlands somewhere to balance the new development. Ecologist have been saying for years that imitating nature is not easy and will likely fail. The U.S. has lost have its wetlands since the 1800s. Thus far we have generally failed to make any progress toward reversing that trend. A Century Later, Restored Wetlands Struggle to Recover
A wetland is a ground area that is saturated with water, be it fresh, brackish or salty, and includes everything from mangroves to marshes. These ecosystems hold more life per acre than other types of habitats, including forests and grasslands, and are often important fishery resources. Moreover, wetlands act as natural flood and erosion control, said David Moreno-Mateos, a wetlands researcher with the University of California at Berkeley.
But these ecosystems also hold value on the global scale, because they store carbon. “When you degrade a wetland, you put a lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere,” Moreno-Mateos told Livescience. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas with ties to global climate change.
The original research paper is here – Restoration of Ailing Wetlands by Oswald J. Schmitz, School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Yale University. They make the case that given the time and proper resources, and more time we could make some genuine progress,
It is widely held that humankind’s destructive tendencies when exploiting natural resources leads to irreparable harm to the environment. Yet, this thinking runs counter to evidence that many ecological systems damaged by severe natural environmental disturbances (e.g., hurricanes) can restore themselves via processes of natural recovery. The emerging field of restoration ecology is capitalizing on the natural restorative tendencies of ecological systems to build a science of repairing the harm inflicted by humans on natural environment. Evidence for this, for example, comes from a new meta-analysis of 124 studies that synthesizes recovery of impacted wetlands worldwide. While it may take up to two human generations to see full recovery, there is promise, given human will, to restore many damaged wetlands worldwide.
That sounds promising in terms of the science. Frequently restoration projects are given short shift. They might be lead by a land developer who did some reading on the subject, dug out some earth, filled it with water and hired a sub-contractor to throw in some plant life ( consulting biologists are sometimes hired, but much of what they advise is ignored). The banks of these new “lakes’ are often too steep. Thus it takes years of natural weathering and erosion before the shores are capable of supporting the kind of vegetation that would result as part of a wetlands natural succession. While reassuring that restoration can be there has to be a political and public will to make wetlands restoration a priority. Much of the public still sees wetlands as useless bogs and swamps. They do not see wetlands as important natural means of flood control, mediatosr of greenhouse gases or essential to biodiversity.
World’s giant trees are dying off rapidly, studies show
The biggest trees in the world, known as the true ecological kings of the jungle, are dying off rapidly as roads, farms and settlements fragment forests and they come under prolonged attack from severe droughts and new pests and diseases.
Long-term studies in Amazonia, Africa and central America show that while these botanical behemoths may have adapted successfully to centuries of storms, pests and short-term climatic extremes, they are counterintuitively more vulnerable than other trees to today’s threats.
“Fragmentation of the forests is now disproportionately affecting the big trees,” said William Laurance, a research professor at James Cook University in Cairns, Australia. “Not only do many more trees die near forest edges, but a higher proportion of the trees dying were the big trees.”
“Their tall stature and relatively thick, inflexible trunks, may make them especially prone to uprooting and breakage near forest edges where wind turbulence is increased,” said Laurance in this week’s New Scientist magazine.
Big trees may comprise less than 2% of the trees in any forest but they can contain 25% of the total biomass and are vital for the health of whole forests because they seed large areas.
Big trees in India are having a tough time establishing saplings because of an invasive shrub. Dutch elm disease killed off almost all the largest elms in Great Britain. The importation of foreign tress is also spreading new diseases because they are not properly checked or quarantined. As older trees die – whether in the U.S. or South America or parts of Asia, forests would release their stored carbon. This begins a vicious circle of further warming and forest shrinkage.
Image of Earth 1024×1024. By way of here The Highest Resolution Image of Earth Ever, you can download a 8000×8000 image.
This composite image uses a number of swaths of the Earth’s surface taken on January 4, 2012.
Photo courtesy of NASA/NOAA/GSFC/Suomi NPP/VIIRS/Norman Kuring
Obviously no one has a desktop that large. There are a few ways to go about making it a desktop. One is to open the 8000x image in your photo editor, make it as high as your desktop allows. Create a new blank file with an empty background. Take your color dropper and get the dark background from the earth image. Fill in the back of your new blank image with that color. Copy and paste the earth image on that background. They should match. If you can see the seams use a feathered brush to blur the edge. Another option is to make the whole image as wide as your desktop and crop off excess at the top or bottom to correct the height. Sometimes slicing a planet image showing the edge of the planet against space can be very dramatic.
Sirenia Shadows
Emerging from the shadows and effortlessly gliding through their domain, the mermaids take central stage in Crystal River. Become entranced with the beauty and grace of the endangered West Indian Manatees of Florida.
