"When a forest is burned, what comes back may not resemble what was lost"
http://news.sciencemag.org/environment/2015/06/when-forest-burned-what-comes-back-may-not-resemble-what-was-lost
"When a fire sweeps through a forest, or a lumber company strips an area of all of its trees, the greenery will eventually grow back. Or so many forestry researchers thought. But a new study in the tropics suggests that these second-growth forests can look very different from what they replaced—a finding that may cause biologists to wonder what biodiversity will be restored and forestry experts to reconsider how much they should or can intervene in the regrowth.
“There’s a high degree of random effects” in what comes back, says Jefferson Hall, a forest ecologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama who was not involved with the work. “It’s a very important study."
"Indeed, the work indicates it won’t be easy to predict how secondary forests growing now will turn out. “You cannot assume the forest that you know is 5 years old will look like the forest that you know is 20 years old,” agrees Stefan Schnitzer, an ecologist at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who was not involved with the work. “It will be a big bummer for a lot of people studying chronosequences.”
Whether deliberately replanting trees is needed to help steer a land back to its previous state is also an open question, the study suggests. “What the paper says is, don’t count on the forest that you replant being the forest next door,” Schnitzer says. “You can still reforest but you still don’t know what you will get.”"
This is so important to understand. I am so dismayed that it is taking so long for people to understand this; I had only one ecology class and this was the most important principle to me. No one in my class understood my obsession with it and, apparently, very few people who are actually running the industry understand how vital this is. So much of current technology and practices could be sustainable, except that major principles like this one are so poorly understood.
