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We did a tour of a local redwood companies tissue culture lab, and almost all the employees were female, and a fair few had developed severe arthritis in their work. Was very depressing to see.
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The only human activity so far on a large enough scale to impact the biosphere as a whole is fossil fuel use. If you want to count that as "terraforming." We could add nuclear weapons to that list, if we ever decided to use them.
No, the changes in land use had significant and detectable impacts far before that. The albedo change between forest and fields alone is quite large.
0) Rather, the first known settlers. But then humans have arguably been settlers everywhere, except for particular parts of Africa.
This species of tree grows all over Northern Coastal California and there huge preserved areas of old growth trees throughout the region. It is great to keep replanting coastal redwoods to help replace all the ones that were cut down, but this cloning of gigantic old stumps sure feels like a pure propaganda move with no ecological benefit over using seeds. It is likely a bad idea to plant a lot of clones of single in…
Where and when can I buy one? Look, this is one of those cool cases where the free market may be able to help the environment instead of harming it. Sell these seedlings for $200/each. Some number of people (myself included) will happily buy them, then plant them wherever and the world has more of these amazing trees. The funds can be used to further the cause of helping forests and old trees.
They may also have some requirements to thrive that aren't that common - IIRC, giant sequoias mostly grow in a fairly thin layer of dirt on top of rock, which means there's also quite a bit of water (slowly) flowing through that dirt since there's noplace for it to go. Not sure how much of that applies to the coastal redwoods being discussed here (they're related, and the common and genus names are confusing - these redwoods are genus Sequoia, but the giant sequoia are actually a different genus).
There's a fair amount of information online about growing either from seed or via cuttings. One key piece of advice: plan for that growth and don't plant within 10m of structures that you're going to want to keep long-term.
Won't they have problems with the low genetic diversity the same way Cavendish bananas seem to be in problem now?
The redwood trees are still able to sexually reproduce with other variants, unlike the banana trees that are cultivated for crops.
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The redwood trees are still able to sexually reproduce with other variants, unlike the banana trees that are cultivated for crops.
The issue is that they appear to be establishing groves of genetically identical trees, so sexual reproduction is irrelevant. Unless you're planting next to an established forest.
This species of tree grows all over Northern Coastal California and there huge preserved areas of old growth trees throughout the region. It is great to keep replanting coastal redwoods to help replace all the ones that were cut down, but this cloning of gigantic old stumps sure feels like a pure propaganda move with no ecological benefit over using seeds. It is likely a bad idea to plant a lot of clones of single in…
For some plants, there is a great variance in behavior between the parent plant and a plant grown from seed. Apples for instance, if grown from seed, likely will not carry all the properties of the parent plant. E.g., the fruit will not taste the same. Apple trees mostly have desirable fruit bearing tissue grafted onto plain understock. Also, some plants show different growth characteristics in mature tissue than in…
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> As these are very large trees, establishing large colonies can have a relatively meaningful impact in carbon capture. Also, they're fast growing, so they capture carbon quickly, and store it for a long time. Plus the fact that, if they're harvested, the wood is relatively rot-resistant. So carbon could be stored over even longer periods, if the wood were used for ~permanent structures. Still, there's something iron…
So if I'm understanding this correctly, we're essentially terraforming Earth...
So perhaps "terraforming" isn't the appropriate term. Maybe more like "un-terraforming". If CO2 goes runaway enough, we might even wipe out enough photosynthetic capacity (especially in the oceans) to undo the Great Oxygenation Event. And make the planet safe for anaerobes again.