Replanting logged forests with diverse seedlings accelerates restoration • Hacker News Board

Re: Replanting logged forests with diverse seedlings accelerates restoration

#151

Post by elsewhen » Tue, Sep 19, 2023, 6:15 PM UTC

greenie_beans wrote: post #42

erikhopf wrote: post #19

There are companies like Terraformation that have been doing this for a while. Beyond the biodiversity angle, seed banking seems to be very important to the long term success of regrowth projects.

i invested in their republic.co fundraising: https://republic.com/terraformation but then did more research, because i've been interested in forestry for a while and was geniunely curious and wanted to understand my investment more. i pulled my investment once i learned that these sort of projects don't actually work. terraformation targets land in areas that aren't meant to be forests. also decided to pull it becaus…

In reading the paper, I don’t think that you can conclude that tree planting programs don’t work, just that the details matter.

Re: Replanting logged forests with diverse seedlings accelerates restoration

#152

Post by Lutger » Tue, Sep 19, 2023, 7:09 PM UTC

taylorius wrote: post #148

Lutger wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we are just accelerating nature's own process That is well put and also exactly my point. However, you are accelerating something, so there is an intervention. For some people this doesn't count as natural! The word 'just' in your sentence does a lot of work. The line is, in fact, not always obvious. Would those seedlings have come there naturally? Or would it have been a different mix? If so, is the end result act…

Again, I agree entirely with you (yet still feel the need to respond) :-) To some extent, who can say what exact mix of seedlings would arise if nature were left entirely to it's own devices. But one can imagine the basin of attraction for arriving at such a stable state is somewhat large (perhaps this is the crux of your point - such a basin cannot be mapped, and therefore one never knows if one is in it or not). Ne…

I agree too. That distinction is clear and useful.

I'm interested in creating a plausible-natural agricultural ecosystem, aka a food forest. Such a system draws more criticism from ecologists, probably because where I live almost all of the desirable species aren't native.

On the one hand, this clearly isn't a normal agricultural system and often looks more like nature, on the other hand 'nature people' often do not really understand its ecological value. So thats where I'm coming from, maybe that clears it up a bit.

There's a weird aside to this story though, because what we (Netherlands) generally consider to be desirable nature is often a landscape created by old agricultural practices.

Re: Replanting logged forests with diverse seedlings accelerates restoration

#153

Post by greenie_beans » Tue, Sep 19, 2023, 8:49 PM UTC

elsewhen wrote: post #151

greenie_beans wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i invested in their republic.co fundraising: https://republic.com/terraformation but then did more research, because i've been interested in forestry for a while and was geniunely curious and wanted to understand my investment more. i pulled my investment once i learned that these sort of projects don't actually work. terraformation targets land in areas that aren't meant to be forests. also decided to pull it becaus…

In reading the paper, I don’t think that you can conclude that tree planting programs don’t work, just that the details matter.

correct. they work when they're done in the right place, like where forests existed historically.