How to Build a Forest

hey so the creators of YouTube joined together to plant 20 million trees which is a great cause and you should definitely donate if you can but today I wanted to look at the impact of something like this and I'd also like to talk about the best ways to actually go about a project like this to start I'd like to talk about forests a diversity well the forest might seem like a single homogeneous entity if they're not rather forests or collections of many different tree species each one interacting with the environment in different ways one species may provide the preferred seeds for a bird to eat while another may grow leaves that are good for the construction of nests and yet another tree's branches may grow in a way that makes nest building possible it's generally agreed that a greater diversity of trees produces a greater variety of forest resources which in turn sustain a greater richness of animals and of their life the greatest example of this would be the Amazon rainforest where the tree diversity can reach up to over 1,100 different tree species in as little as a quarter of a square kilometre while up to 16 thousand a different tree species exists here overall so it's no surprise that predictions for the total number of animal species in the Amazon go as high as 10 million that's why the Amazon is also one of the oldest forests in the world surviving for over 55 million years to see what happens when biodiversity isn't taken into account we can look at the biggest reforestation project in history China's great green wall a massive reforestation efforts starting in the 1970s which continues to this day and plans to finish around 2050 its purpose was to prevent the advance of the Gobi Desert into the Chinese interior by planting a barrier of trees across northern China because the focus was on growth instead of diversity only a small variety of fast-growing trees like Chinese poplars were planted in most sites having even been called green deserts worse than that in the year 2000 when an open floor infected many of the newly planted artificial forests are reported 1 billion poplar trees died setting the entire project back by 20 years revealing just how vulnerable monocultures can be diversity of course has its limits as well you can't simply take different tree species found all over the world plant them somewhere else expecting a successful ecosystem to appear instead plants native to the area should be used not only does this give them a better chance at surviving whatever unique climate conditions of region might experience but it also ensures that the trees planted can eventually be used by the animals in the area which is kind of the point of all this assuming that the people behind team trees already know this the next step is asking how we can plant 20 million trees to make the absolute maximum impact first off while 20 million trees is a lot of trees is that actually a lot of trees well in mr. beasts video he says they're planting them eight feet apart on either side giving each tree 64 square feet if you did the same for every tree planted that would give you a forest covering 1 billion and 280 million square feet translating this number into one that actually makes sense and that's nearly 120 square kilometres which know isn't enough to save the world but is still a really decent reforestation effort and is like reforesting all of the Bronx in New York City once planted each tree will begin to take in carbon from the atmosphere and using it to construct its body and leaves will sequester around a ton of carbon dioxide over the first 40 years of its life more importantly if done correctly the trees will begin facilitating the introduction of additional species from the surroundings an important thing to note is that many species come to the forest not only for the resources but also the protection the forest provides from potential predators because of this animals and even plant species will concentrate themselves in the core of the forest leaving areas of transition around the edges a result of two different ecosystems overlapping these transition zones can actually become thriving in diverse ecosystems in their own right but when planting a tree on land cleared by humans there isn't really going to be this mixing of environments so these transition zones are going to be areas of lower productivity with each tree added though the ratio of core to periphery grows larger meaning we maximize the area of highest productivity forest by planting all twenty million trees together if done perfectly this would result in a circular forest with a radius of over six kilometers which is pretty good for a standalone for however the earth luckily already has some forests which means we can actually do better than this by placing our new forests against a pre-existing forest we can further decrease the area of transition while increasing the number of trees in the core of the forest even better than this however if there's a hole inside of a pre-existing forest then all of the trees planted will contribute to the forest core having a clear hole perfectly cut out of a forest might seem like a bizarre circumstance but things like this aren't really uncommon these days but with a little creativity we can do even better consider this forest let's say it's big enough to support six hunting grounds which is enough to maintain one small population of apex predators as long as they continually migrate between resources okay but now say a wall or more commonly a road is made to cut through this environment separating one side from the other without as many resources to feed on many members of the pack starve to death and those that remain aren't numerous enough to continue hunting effectively in the most extreme case the apex predator goes extinct in this area and while some of us might figure the extinction of dangerous predators to be a good thing this can have tremendously negative impacts on the environment I actually went out to a forested Nature Preserve near me where this exact thing is happening predators like coyotes and wolves were essentially eradicated from this area which has led the deer population to explode eating every sapling tree until the forest floor is completely empty I took this footage at the height of summer when all the plants were in bloom but even then you can still see deep into the forest for a comparison this is what a healthy forest floor should look like plenty of undergrowth giving the forest a greater level of complexity but here the only thing that survives on the floor is grass which while it might look cool can be a sign of impending death an indicator that the process of becoming a grassland has already begun here this series of compounding effects on an ecosystem is called a trophic cascade and once the grass grows high enough here it'll be able to block out sunlight reaching the very bottom of the forest floor effectively smothering out slower growing plants like sapling trees the forest will thin out over time becoming a woodland and eventually a grassland in short even though this hypothetical road damaged very little of the forest directly all of the forest was or will be in fact damaged but if you left even a small part of these two forest fragments connected if this would open the rest of the hunting grounds back up effectively creating a single forest again these connective areas are called corridors and we've just started to see concepts of them make it into small-scale resource management and new construction projects using those 20 million trees to create corridors habitats containing literally billions of trees could be brought back into the ecosystem and by using the smaller fragments of force to guide the planting of corridors many smaller forest fragments can also be reincorporated while reducing the number of trees needed for each corridor and this if you ask me is the best use of 20 million trees ok so now that we have figured this all out the last thing I want to ask is what type of forest should we try to replant the answer to this obviously depends on funding and project goals and logistics but generally if you're just trying to reforest to the earth and you want to support the greatest amount of biodiversity than rainforests are your best bet all rain forests are important but the ones I'd suggest prioritizing are the ones that are really hurting right now like the Southeast Asian rainforest once bigger than the Amazon though today it's mostly fractured by the cities and farms of around 650 million people another incredibly damaged rainforest is the often forgotten sister to the Amazon the Atlantic rainforest home to the majority of brazil's population over 85% of this rainforest has been destroyed since the discovery of the Americas by the Europeans but in recent years another use of reforestation has been put forward to fight climate change if this is the goal then what we're looking for isn't a forest at all but actually a wetland and more specifically a mire or a bog or a muskeg or what's generally known as a peatland well maybe not as popular as rainforests what peatlands lack and charm they make up for in their ability to store carbon you see when something like a tree dies in any regular forest it eventually rots releasing all the carbon captured during its life back into atmosphere in peatlands however dead organic matter and particularly sphagnum Moss finds its way into oxygen depleted waters slowing down and even halting the process of decomposition this leads the organic material to collect and form a substance known as peat an extremely dense store of carbon these are the first steps towards truly sequestering carbon from the atmosphere into the subsurface of the earth this is also the first step into making fossil fuels and if enough time went by the peat would eventually become coal making it the only substance that is considered both a fossil fuel as well as a slowly renewable resource but this process can take hundreds to thousands of years meaning using it to combat climate change on a human time scale isn't really feasible no matter how they're planted though every tree will help which means there's no reason not to donate if you're a patron of mine don't worry I took the money you guys gave me in October and donated to team trees so technically you've already donated as well but like you just learned the more trees the better so feel free to donate more I know this video is coming out a bit after everyone else put out their videos for the front raiser but I had no idea this was gonna happen and it takes time for me to make videos so here I am a bit late to the party either way I hope you enjoyed and if you want to see more videos about forests and maybe even hear my voice there should be a link on screen taking you to a channel that I had to create for my university so check it out if you want to know what I sound like when not reading a script thanks

Channel: Atlas Pro

Views: 1,238,952

Rating: 4.9503331 out of 5

Keywords: education, geography, science, atlaspro, team, trees, forest, planting

Id: PkVZBSKdwQM

Length: 10min 25sec (625 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 30 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/akhetonz]

How does one make a productive wetland 🤔