How to Build a Forest

Hey, YouTube creators came together to plant 20 million trees, which is a great cause and you should definitely donate if you can, but today I wanted to see the impact of something like this and I'd also like to talk about the best ones. To start, ways to carry out a project like this. I would like to talk about

forest

diversity. While a

forest

may seem like a single, homogeneous entity, they are not. Rather, forests are collections of many different tree species, each of which interacts with the environment in different ways, one species can provide the seeds preferred for a bird to eat, while another may grow leaves that are good for nest

build

ing and another the branches of a tree may grow in a way that makes nest

build

ing possible.

It is generally accepted that a greater diversity of trees produces a greater variety of forest resources which in turn support a greater wealth of animals and other forms of life. The biggest example of this would be the Amazon rainforest, where tree diversity can reach up to over 1,100 different tree species in just a quarter of the time. a square kilometer, while there are up to 16,000 different species of trees here, so it is not surprising that predictions for the total number of animal species in the Amazon reach 10 million, so the Amazon is also one of the forests oldest in the world.

The world has survived for more than 55 million years to see what happens when biodiversity is not taken into account, we can see the largest reforestation project in history. The Great Green Wall of China, a massive reforestation effort that began in the 1970s and continues to this day and plans to end. around 2050. Its purpose was to prevent the advance of the Gobi Desert into inland China by planting a barrier of trees across northern China because the focus was on growth rather than diversity, only a small variety was planted of fast-growing trees, such as Chinese poplars. in most places they were even called green deserts, worse than in 2000, when anopliflora infected many of the newly planted artificial forests, a billion poplar trees were reported to have died, delaying the entire project by 20 years, which reveals how vulnerable monocultures can be to the diversity of Of course, it also has its limits, you can't just take different species of trees found around the world and plant them somewhere else hoping for a successful ecosystem to appear, but That plants native to the area should be used, not only does this give them a better chance of surviving any unique climatic conditions a region may experience, but it also ensures that the planted trees can eventually be used by animals in the area, which is the point of all this, assuming the people behind the Tree Team already know this, the next step is to ask how we can plant 20 million trees for absolute maximum impact in the first place, while 20 million trees are many trees, in reality there are many trees.

In Mr BEAST's video, he says they are planting them eight feet apart on each side. giving each tree 64 square feet, if you did the same with each planted tree, you would get a forest that would cover one billion and 280 million square feet, translating this number to what really makes sense and it is almost 120 square kilometers, which is not, it is not. enough to save the world, but it's still a really decent reforestation effort and it's like reforesting the entire Bronx in New York City. Once planted, each tree will begin to absorb carbon from the atmosphere and use it to build its body and its leaves will sequester it around it. a ton of carbon dioxide over the first 40 years of their life, more importantly, if done correctly, the trees will begin to facilitate the introduction of additional species from the surrounding area.

An important thing to note is that many species come to the forest not only for the resources but also the protection that the forest provides from potential predators. Because of this, animals and even plant species will be concentrated in the center of the forest. forest leaving transition areas around the edges as a result of the overlap of two different ecosystems. These transition zones can actually become thriving and diverse ecosystems. in its own right, but when planting a tree on land cleared by humans there will not actually be this mix of environments, so these transition zones will be areas of lower productivity with each tree added although the ratio between the center and the periphery grows.

Which means we maximize the most productive forest area by planting all 20 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 self-contained forest; However, fortunately, the Earth already has some forests. meaning we can do better than this by placing our new forest against a pre-existing forest, we can further decrease the transition area and at the same time increase the number of trees in the center of the forest, even better than this; However, if there is a hole within a pre-existing forest, then all planted trees will contribute to the core of the forest.

Having a perfectly cut clear hole in a forest may seem like a strange circumstance, but things like this are not 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 support a small population of predators as long as they continually migrate between resources, okay, but now let's say it's a wall or, more commonly, a road. made to traverse this environment that separates one side from the other without as many resources to feed itself, many members of the pack die of hunger and those that remain are not numerous enough to continue hunting effectively, in the most extreme case, the apex predator extinguishes. in this area and although some of us might think that the extinction of dangerous predators is a good thing, this can have tremendously negative impacts on the environment.

In fact, I went to a forested nature reserve near me where exactly this is happening. Predators such as coyotes and wolves were essentially eradicated from this area, which has led to the deer population exploding and eating every sapling until the forest floor is completely bare. I took these images in the middle of summer, when all the plants were in bloom, but even then you can still see deep. We entered the forest to make a comparison. This is what a healthy forest floor should look like, with lots of undergrowth giving the forest a higher level of complexity, but here the only thing surviving on the ground is the grass which, while it may look fresh, can be a sign of imminent death an indicator that the process of turning into grassland has already begun here this series of compound effects in an ecosystem is called a trophic cascade and once the grass grows tall enough here it will be able to block sunlight reaching the bottom of the forest floor effectively smothers slower growing plants such as saplings, the forest will shrink over time becoming a forest and eventually a grassland, in short, even though this hypothetical road damaged very little of the forest directly, the entire forest was or will be in fact. damaged, but if you were to leave even a small part of these two forest fragments connected, this would open up the rest of the hunting grounds again, effectively creating a single forest again.

These connective areas are called corridors and we have just started to see concepts of them. Converting it to 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 smallest fragments of force to guide the planting of corridors, many smaller forest fragments can also be reintroduced while reducing the number of trees needed for each corridor and, if you ask me, this is the best use of 20 million trees. Now that we've got all of this figured 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, project goals, and logistics, but in general, if you're just trying to reforest the Earth and you want to support the greatest amount of biodiversity, rainforests are your best option, all rainforests are important. but the ones I would suggest prioritizing are the ones that are really suffering right now, like the Southeast Asian rainforest that was once larger than the Amazon, although today it is mostly fractured by the cities and farms around 6.65 billion people. Another incredibly damaged rainforest is the Amazon's often forgotten sister, the Atlantic Rainforest, home to the majority of Brazil's population; more than 85 percent of this rainforest has been destroyed since the discovery of America by Europeans. but in recent years another use of reforestation has been proposed to fight climate change.

If this is the goal, then what we are looking for is not a forest at all, but a wetland and, more specifically, a quagmire, a swamp. or a muskeg or what is generally known as a peat bog, although perhaps not as popular as rainforests, which peat bogs lack. And the charm they make up for with their ability to store carbon is seen when something like a tree dies in any normal forest, it eventually rots releasing all the carbon captured during its life back into the atmosphere in the peat bogs, however, matter is found dead organic matter and particularly sphagnum moss.

Its path into oxygen-depleted waters slows and even stops the decomposition process, allowing organic material to build up and form a substance known as peat, an extremely dense store of carbon. These are the first steps towards true sequestration of carbon from the atmosphere into the Earth's subsurface, this is also the first step in producing fossil fuels and, if enough time passed, peat would eventually become coal, making it the only substance that is considered both a fossil fuel and a slowly renewable resource, but this process can take hundreds to thousands of years, meaning that using it to combat climate change on a human time scale is not really feasible, no matter how it is done. plant, although every tree will help, which means there's no reason not to donate if you're one of my sponsors.

Don't worry, I took the money you guys gave me in October and donated it to the team trees, so technically you donated too, but as you just learned, the more trees the better, so feel free to donate more. I know this video is coming. It came out a little after everyone else posted their fundraising videos but I had no idea this was going to happen and it takes me a while to make videos so I'm a little late to the party anyway I hope If you want to see more videos about the forest and maybe even hear my voice, there should be a link on the screen that takes you to a channel I had to create for my university, so check it out if you want to know how I talk when I don't read. a script thanks