Selective logging is causing long-term changes to tropical forests in Africa by facilitating the growth of weeds and vines, which reduces plant diversity and diminishes carbon storage, reports a new paper published in the journal Ecological Research.
How does selective cutting improve biodiversity?
Selective cutting reduces crowding, encourages growth of younger trees, maintains an uneven-aged stand of tress of different species, and allows natural regeneration from surrounding trees.
Why is selective cutting a better way to log?
Selective logging is often considered a better alternative to clear cutting in which a large area of a forest is cut down, leaving little behind except wood debris and a deforested landscape. The ecological, social, and economic impacts drive a better understanding of efficient forest management techniques.
What are effects of cutting down trees?
The loss of trees and other vegetation can cause climate change, desertification, soil erosion, fewer crops, flooding, increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and a host of problems for indigenous people.
Do trees grow back after clear-cutting?
Redwoods Regrow After Fires In the past 70 to 80 years, most fires in California’s coast redwood forests were prevented or suppressed.
How does clear-cutting affect human health?
But deforestation is having another worrisome effect: an increase in the spread of life-threatening diseases such as malaria and dengue fever. For a host of ecological reasons, the loss of forest can act as an incubator for insect-borne and other infectious diseases that afflict humans.
Why is cut clear?
The principal objective of clearcutting is to regenerate the forest with healthier trees, not to harvest timber. Timber harvesting is a secondary objective. Clearcutting is especially useful in regenerat- ing species of trees whose seedlings cannot thrive in the shade of a forest understory.
What animals are affected by clear cutting?
Four species of ducks, snakes, mice, several owls, nuthatches, chickadees, tree swallows, flying squirrels, bats, kestrels, wild bees, seven woodpecker species and many other animals and birds depend on such tree cavities. Current forest management regimes leave a few, largely useless, clumps of trees in clear cuts.
What means clear-cut?
1 : sharply outlined : distinct. 2 : free from ambiguity or uncertainty : unambiguous a clear-cut decision.
What is a forest clearing called?
In the most general sense, a glade or clearing is an open area within a forest. Glades are often grassy meadows under the canopy of deciduous trees such as red alder or quaking aspen in western North America.
What is the process of clearing forests?
Deforestation is the purposeful clearing of forested land. Throughout history and into modern times, forests have been razed to make space for agriculture and animal grazing, and to obtain wood for fuel, manufacturing, and construction. Deforestation has greatly altered landscapes around the world.
What is an open area of grass in a forest called?
Word forms: plural heaths. countable noun. A heath is an area of open land covered with rough grass or heather and with very few trees or bushes.
What is a field of grass called?
pasture Add to list Share. As a noun, a pasture is a field where animals such as horses and cattle can graze, or feed. Pasture can also refer to the grasses or other plants that grow in a pasture.
What do you call a place full of grass?
grassland. noun. a large area of land where wild grass grows. You can also talk about grasslands, and this has the same meaning.
