Scientists Uncover Forest Tipping Point: Deliberately Destroy 50% And The Remainder Unwinds Quickly

[hatrack]

Scientists believe they’ve uncovered a tipping point in the deforestation of landscapes across Earth: Once an area loses half its forest, the rest of the forest is often swift to fall.

Deforestation of the first half takes more time, as humans chip away the forest to create hodgepodges of forests and agricultural lands, for example, or as anthropogenic climate change levels its effects, the researchers reported in the journal Geophyscial Research Letters on Dec. 3. “You would expect people would create more fragmentation, but as it turns out, people never stop,” Tomasz Stepinski, a physicist at the University of Cincinnati in the U.S. and one of the paper’s authors, said in a statement. “They convert the entire block on a large scale.”

EDIT

Using satellite maps from the European Space Agency, Stepinski and fellow author Jakub Nowosad, a former postdoctoral scholar at the University of Cincinnati, plotted out 9-by-9-kilometer (5.6-by-5.6-mile) squares across Earth’s surface and identified 64 landscape combinations present in these blocks. They then analyzed the changes that occurred in these areas between 1992 and 2015. Over that period, about 15% of them made near-complete transitions from one type to another.

Stepinski and Nowosad also wanted to understand how these transitions might occur in the future, so they built a statistical model using the forest-to-farmland transition as a case study. Still, the application of the model to other transitions might help reveal other tipping points as well, said Nowosad, now an assistant professor in geoecology and geoinformation at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poland. “This model can be used to help understand how landscapes evolved and are going to evolve in the future,” he said.

EDIT

https://news.mongabay.com/2020/01/forest-loss-deforestation-tipping-point-50/

[ck4829]

1. So much for the Thanos strategy

[mopinko]

2. we need to start looking for the points where things can tip the other way.

imho, applying the principles of regenerative agriculture could be applied to those places that have already been cleared, then spent and abandoned.

it isnt even expensive. it's mostly a matter of a little training, and some supports to get through the first couple years.