Tree Planting Can Harm Ecosystems

The world's grassy biomes are key contributors to biodiversity and ecosystem services, and are under immense pressure from conversion to agriculture and tree planting, report Joseph W. Veldman, of Iowa State University, and his colleagues in an article for the October issue of BioScience (https://bioscience.oxfordjournals.org/lookup/doi/10.1093/biosci/biv118). The authors argue that forest- and tree-focused environmental policies and conservation initiatives have potentially dire ecological consequences for undervalued ecosystems, such as grasslands, savannas, and open-canopy woodlands. To illustrate this forest bias and its consequences, Veldman and colleagues review the World Resources Institute and International Union for Conservation of Nature's Atlas of Forest Landscape Restoration Opportunities, created as a tool to achieve the Bonn Challenge to restore 150 million hectares of deforested and degraded lands by 2020. The BioScience authors' global analysis suggests that the Atlas erroneously mapped 9 million square kilometers as providing "opportunities" for forest restoration. These errors arose largely because "the Atlas producers considered any nonforest area where climate could permit forest development to be deforested." Problems such as this one, combined with the failure of United Nations environmental policymakers to recognize grassy biomes for protection, constitute a significant threat to biodiversity, Veldman and his coauthors write. Furthermore, the author...
Source: BioScience Press Releases - Category: Biology Source Type: news