China
Africa
Explore chapters and articles related to this topic
Fuels and the Environment
Published in Michael Frank Hordeski, Alternative Fuels—The Future of Hydrogen, 2020
Creating carbon sinks includes planting new forests, which the Kyoto climate treaty encourages. In China, the government has planted tens of millions of acres of trees since the 1970s. This was done to control floods and erosion, but one result has been to soak up almost half a billion tons of carbon. Young trees are hungry for carbon before they mature, so one technique is to keep a forest young by regular thinning. U.S. forests have increased by more than 40% in the last 50 years, from 600 billion to nearly 860 billion. Standing timber is increasing at a rate of almost 1% per year in the country. Reforestation can be used as a carbon bank to capture carbon from the atmosphere, but the decay or burning of harvested trees decades later would add some carbon.
Forest Ecosystem Monitoring Using Unmanned Aerial Systems
Published in David R. Green, Billy J. Gregory, Alex R. Karachok, Unmanned Aerial Remote Sensing, 2020
Cristina Gómez, Tristan R.H. Goodbody, Nicholas C. Coops, Flor Álvarez-Taboada, Enoc Sanz-Ablanedo
Forest regeneration with little to no human intervention has low silvicultural costs but results in little control over the distribution, density, and content of the re-establishing forest (Duryea, 1987). Density and species composition are fundamental to effective planning of silviculture and play important roles in the future quality and quantity of timber and non-timber products, as well as in growth rates (Minore and Laacke, 1992). Artificial reforestation by planting nursery-grown trees or through dispersion of seeds requires silvicultural treatments like soil scarification to ensure forests regenerate emulating the pre-harvest state (Natural Resources Canada, 2016). To ensure the viability and success of forest regeneration, information on stocking density, health, and stand composition should be routinely acquired. These data are often manually collected through field sampling and reconnaissance, constituting costly efforts in vast areas like British Columbia (Canada) where surveys can exceed over 1 million hectares or ha annually (MFLNRO, 2016). More efficient and cost-effective ways to provide inventory data evaluating regeneration success are needed. To date, few works have explored the capacity of UAV to provide information of forest regeneration stages. Goodbody et al. (2018) determined the effectiveness of UAV imagery for detailing the distribution, height, and spectral information of regenerating forests from a Canadian perspective (Figure 11.6).
Environment
Published in Hemanta Doloi, Ray Green, Sally Donovan, Planning, Housing and Infrastructure for Smart Villages, 2018
Hemanta Doloi, Ray Green, Sally Donovan
Reforestation projects can also preserve or restore biodiversity in areas that have been decimated by human activity. Case Study 11.2 shows how the actions of a single person can lead to a huge recovery in forest area. However, many reforestation projects are driven by a desire to increase carbon stores and limit the impacts of climate change. This motivation led early reforestation projects, such as those in China and South Korea, to plant cheap, easy to propagate and fast growing non-native species, such as eucalyptus, rather than many of the native tree species found in these regions (Silva et al., 2017). The easy growth of these non-native species means they could propagate and become invasive in areas of native flora, potentially decreasing biodiversity.
Reversing deforestation in a time of changing climate: implications for water management
Published in Water International, 2023
Gauravjeet Singh, Mihretab G. Tedla, Oscar Alvarado
Deforestation is known to drive climate change, mainly by altering the oxygen and carbon balance in the atmosphere. Since the Industrial Revolution, the rate of global warming has substantially increased and the global average surface temperature has consistently exceeded 1.5°C above the pre-industrial level (Ghosh, 2021). Desertification is on the rise and more areas face water shortages than ever. As a result, afforestation and reforestation serve to mitigate desertification, maintain a clean environment, capture atmospheric carbon and provide a source of drinking water. Afforestation in semi-arid regions generally leads to increased precipitation in areas larger than the originally afforested area (Yosef et al., 2018). In the following section we will see different aspects of efforts against deforestation in different parts of the world. The implication of afforestation on water resources management are discussed in the following sections.