Iceland's attempts to replant its forests • Hacker News Board

Re: Iceland's attempts to replant its forests

#151

Post by jaredandrews » Fri, Oct 20, 2017, 5:07 PM UTC

kibwen wrote: post #133

durgiston wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The NE also went from 30% forest to 70% open/farming land to 70% forest 30% open in about 100 years as agriculturalism gave way to industrialization. So that could also contribute to giving deer more cover/habitat. Also we killed all the wolves east of the Mississippi 50 years, and coyotes have yet to fill their niche.

> The NE also went from 30% forest to 70% open/farming land to 70% forest 30% open in about 100 years as agriculturalism gave way to industrialization. Source? It would surprise me to see that many people voluntarily give up their farmland rather than, say, selling it to industrial farmers or real estate developers.

If you are driving thru New England and pull over to any forest you can start walking and eventually you will find a short stone wall. These stone walls used to mark the borders of farm land but now they are in the middle of the forest. They are everywhere! Really gives you an idea of how much farming used to go on there.

Of course, that is anecdotal, you can read more here: https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/08/31/new-england-see...

Re: Iceland's attempts to replant its forests

#152

Post by ddoolin » Fri, Oct 20, 2017, 5:10 PM UTC

njarboe wrote: post #124

avar wrote: post #6

For reasons I won't go into the farming lobby is really strong in Iceland. Sheep run free-range around the entire island, if you'd like to grow something that sheep like to eat you need to fence it in. It's not like pretty much anywhere else in the western world where people who own grazing animals need to fence them in. Thus the sheep range far and wide and destroy Iceland's native low-lying forests. Iceland's nativ…

I was in Iceland a few weeks ago and the people, museums, info plaques, etc. talked about deforestation and how the early settlers chopped down all the forests. Also mentioned was forestation and how they were slowly replanting. The grazing by horses and sheep were never mentioned as a problem. I did hear about how flocks of sheep are just let loose in the highlands in the summer to graze and the sheep herders separa…

That photo is a sharp (and fascinating) reinforcement of the grazing sheep point. Is there any other reason those trees would grow clustered right there and nowhere else? Was that area not accessible by sheep?

Re: Iceland's attempts to replant its forests

#153

Post by sliverstorm » Fri, Oct 20, 2017, 5:17 PM UTC

oh_sigh wrote: post #140

sliverstorm wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may not need a higher efficacy, herd immunity does not require 100%. Chart of herd immunity thresholds for some diseases: https://www-tc.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/assets/img/herd-immunity/im...

Lyme disease isn't passed from human to human so herd immunity is irrelevant.

My mistake, I thought it was a vaccine for the deer.

Re: Iceland's attempts to replant its forests

#154

Post by arnarbi » Fri, Oct 20, 2017, 5:19 PM UTC

ccozan wrote: post #107

ccozan wrote: post #64

Is this a case where robots could do almost all work? Define an area, load the saplings and send the robot to bore holes, put the sapling, fill, repeat.

I don't understand the downvotes. Can someone explain? Is a valid question, looking for an answer from a person with more knowledge.

Because it isn't a problem with planting. That's very easy, and people volunteer to do it. When I was a kid (I'm Icelandic) we'd go on field trips and plant hundreds.

The problem is keeping the growth alive.

Re: Iceland's attempts to replant its forests

#155

Post by devb » Fri, Oct 20, 2017, 5:20 PM UTC

riot504 wrote: post #98

ckinnan wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is actually a similar problem in the Northeastern United States. Deer are overpopulated (in my area 6x traditional level) because they have no predators and hunting is restricted. The deer eat all of the hardwood saplings. In many mid-Atlantic forests there are very few 10-20 year old hard wood trees, they don't survive the deer.

It appears a simple solution of allowing hunting to occur would solve the problem. Why is hunting restricted?

It's not a simple solution, because it's not very effective. In areas with limited open space, hunting is very much an exclusionary activity. In Staten Island, the NYC Parks Department is performing an experiment in deer sterilization: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/22/nyregion/deer-vasectomies...

Re: Iceland's attempts to replant its forests

#156

Post by brightsize » Fri, Oct 20, 2017, 5:20 PM UTC

kibwen wrote: post #133

durgiston wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The NE also went from 30% forest to 70% open/farming land to 70% forest 30% open in about 100 years as agriculturalism gave way to industrialization. So that could also contribute to giving deer more cover/habitat. Also we killed all the wolves east of the Mississippi 50 years, and coyotes have yet to fill their niche.

> The NE also went from 30% forest to 70% open/farming land to 70% forest 30% open in about 100 years as agriculturalism gave way to industrialization. Source? It would surprise me to see that many people voluntarily give up their farmland rather than, say, selling it to industrial farmers or real estate developers.

I grew up in Vermont and the woods are full of old stone walls put up by farmers and cellar holes where their buildings used to be. Not just on the edge of the woods, but deep within them too. I'm not a student of farming but I don't think that New England is a particularly good place to do it. Lots of hills and mountains and rocky soil. As for real estate developers, there's a lot more money to be made in heavily populated areas of the country. Taking VT as an example, the state contains fewer residents than the Boise, ID metropolitan area does, and the largest city has fewer than 45K people.

edit: removed link to an article that has been posted several times.

Re: Iceland's attempts to replant its forests

#157

Post by devb » Fri, Oct 20, 2017, 5:22 PM UTC

cromulent wrote: post #86

vram22 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Search for "Medieval Warm Period" in this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iceland Happened to be reading about Iceland (and its cuisine :) recently.

Thanks. My understanding was that the MWP is thought to be localized to Europe, not Greenland and Iceland.

I was just reading about Swedish prehistory and there was mention of a drastic climate cooling period.

Re: Iceland's attempts to replant its forests

#158

Post by maehwasu » Fri, Oct 20, 2017, 5:22 PM UTC

mywittyname wrote: post #135

Kluny wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what the case is in NE US, but in my town in British Columbia, the deer population is out of control in the metropolitan area, and every time a cull is mentioned, animal rights activists put a stop to it through loud and effective lobbying. It's quite irritating.

Even if they were allowed to hunt deer, it probably wouldn't help. So much of the land deer graze over in the Midwest is suburban and have laws in place regarding setting off a firearm. This limits hunting to public lands, of which, there might be 2-3 within an hour drive of the city. So no matter how much the hunters kill, they aren't likely to effect the populations in the surrounding suburbs. There are more huntin…

There are tons of solutions that aren't hunting, but animal rights activists are just as shrill about those.

Re: Iceland's attempts to replant its forests

#159

Post by avar » Fri, Oct 20, 2017, 5:24 PM UTC

njarboe wrote: post #124

avar wrote: post #6

For reasons I won't go into the farming lobby is really strong in Iceland. Sheep run free-range around the entire island, if you'd like to grow something that sheep like to eat you need to fence it in. It's not like pretty much anywhere else in the western world where people who own grazing animals need to fence them in. Thus the sheep range far and wide and destroy Iceland's native low-lying forests. Iceland's nativ…

I was in Iceland a few weeks ago and the people, museums, info plaques, etc. talked about deforestation and how the early settlers chopped down all the forests. Also mentioned was forestation and how they were slowly replanting. The grazing by horses and sheep were never mentioned as a problem. I did hear about how flocks of sheep are just let loose in the highlands in the summer to graze and the sheep herders separa…

The tl;dr of Iceland's colonization is: Norse settlers arrive, placement in society is based on how big of a farmer you are. Thus they overgraze and unlike their native Scandinavia they're doing this on a volcanic island with really thin topsoil, so the overgrazing leads to runaway topsoil erosion and dustbowlification. This leads to desperate logging of the last of the trees around for firewood and housing.

It's never remotely recovered, but that process is slowly starting just now. I was trying to find a photo like the one you just posted but couldn't. There's lots of examples like that where the plant biodiversity in an area where the sheep can't get to is night & day compared to the area right next to it where they can.

Which is not to say that those specific trees are old growth forest or anything like that. Icelanders pretty much lived in mud huts until after WWII in large parts of the country. If the sheep didn't get to a place like that some guy would have certainly swam over there to gather firewood. But it'll have been left alone by sheep and man in the last several decades, which as you can see makes a huge difference.

Edit: Here's an even more stunning photo of an island in the middle of a river that because of the depth of the river has been left alone by both man & grazers: http://www.skogur.is/media/frettir-2014/myndasafn-storar/Vid...

The accompanying article (in Icelandic, but it translates ok-ish) says that compared to the land around it it has a lot more biodiversity and a better topsoil, similar to other areas in the country protected from grazers that they've studied: http://www.skogur.is/um-skograekt-rikisins/vidburdir/2014/04...

Re: Iceland's attempts to replant its forests

#160

Post by stevenwoo » Fri, Oct 20, 2017, 5:27 PM UTC

NegativeLatency wrote: post #115

Kluny wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what the case is in NE US, but in my town in British Columbia, the deer population is out of control in the metropolitan area, and every time a cull is mentioned, animal rights activists put a stop to it through loud and effective lobbying. It's quite irritating.

I suppose wolves wouldn't be popular in a suburban environment either.

Plenty of mountain lions in suburban California. I've seen them in Palo Alto and Cupertino (in the mountains that are on the edges of the cities).

The people decided it was better to live with mountain lions instead of killing them off in 1990, after we killed off the grizzly and the wolf in the state. http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?...