How to Plant the Forests of the Future

Post by hinkley » Sat, Sep 04, 2021, 4:12 PM UTC

FooHentai wrote: post #9

sp332 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Burying it and letting it rot would release the carbon. Logging it and turning it into lumber delays that process a lot longer.

There's research into this. Release to atmosphere from buried logs is minimal if done with that aim in mind: https://cbmjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1750-0... It's not onerous either, a hectare of trees can be sequestered in a 25m2 pit. Alternatively you can biochar it and then interr, but more labour and time intensive with the extra steps.

The charcoal will contain at most half of the carbon, the other half goes up in smoke. You could do cogeneration with that but now you need a plant nearby or heavy transportation which likely won’t be carbon negative. And the more you process it the more extractive the process is, and the we need something that isn’t extractive.

Post by hinkley » Sat, Sep 04, 2021, 4:18 PM UTC

betwixthewires wrote: post #3

IMO this is a terrible idea. Humans love to try to engineer things and wind up mucking things up sticking their fingers in it. Think of all the invasive deliberately introduced species worldwide. In some cases it worked out, but the results were not predictable, in most cases it caused unforseen problems usually as bad as or worse than the one people were trying to solve. > Currently voluntary for foresters, transfer…

Another aspect of getting in front of it is that forests make their own weather. An ecosystem has a microclimate, and when you remove it the microclimate shifts much faster than the climate does. The empty field they are eyeballing for a forest is going to be a much harder prospect for the native trees than an intact forest will be.

This is especially true of temperate forests, and temperate forests are, according to current understanding, the ones that sequester by far the most carbon. It’s partly to do with the soil being fungally dominant. Fungal soils also create their own weather, but they can’t do so if it gets too hot and dry or too tropical. The longer we wait to do something the less land there is to start a temperate forest.

Re: How to Plant the Forests of the Future

Re: How to Plant the Forests of the Future