Forests with a greater variety of trees store more carbon, better regulate water and protect the soil, reveals international study
Forests with a greater variety of trees regulate water better, store more carbon and protect the soil more effectively than those where species are scarce. This was demonstrated by a team of scientists from 15 countries when analyzing 846 hydrographic basins, which are the areas of land that drain water into the same river or lake, spread across different continents. They published their results in the journal Nature Communications
The research is signed by Jiehao Zhang, Peter Reich and more than twenty scientists from institutions in China, the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Germany, France, Portugal, Italy, Russia, Switzerland, Spain, Australia, Poland and Argentina. The team included scientist Pablo Peri, who is a Conicet researcher at the National University of Southern Patagonia (UNPA) and national coordinator of the forestry program at the National Institute of Agricultural Technology (INTA), in Río Gallegos, Santa Cruz, in Argentina. The international group wanted to know if the diversity of trees improved the capacity of a basin to fulfill several ecological functions at the same time: scientists include it as multifunctionality. Multifunctionality is the capacity of a forest to fulfill several ecological functions at the same time: store carbon, regulate water, protect the soil and sustain wildlife, all at the same time and without one task taking place from the other, Dr. Peri explained to Infobae. They also wondered if this effect changes depending on the size of the basin. basin or the climate of the region. To answer it, they cross-referenced data from more than 777,000 permanent forest plots in 44 countries, which were obtained from the Global Forest Biodiversity Initiative (GFBI). To this they added hydrological records from the Global Archive of Flow Indices and Metadata (GSIM) and satellite data on temperature, precipitation, soil type and topography. With that basis, they evaluated 11 different ecological functions in each basin: carbon capture, biomass storage, water supply, flow regulation and soil retention, among others. They applied statistical models to separate the weight of tree diversity from the effect of climate and forest structure, and thus obtain a clean result. The forest wins with different trees The results showed that the more tree species a basin has, the better each forest works: it stores more carbon, regulates water better and protects the soil more. That link was sustained in all the calculation methods that the researchers used, which gives strength to the finding. That effect, however, is not the same everywhere: it was stronger in large basins and in humid climates. In arid or dry areas, having many tree species was no longer an advantage and even showed a negative relationship with forest performance. The researchers explained that, when water is scarce, trees compete with each other instead of complementing each other, and this nullifies the benefits of diversity. Another finding of the study has to do with the canopy, which is the roof of leaves and branches that trees form over the forest. The study found that forests with more species tend to have a denser and more complex canopy, and that this The thickest canopy is the one that improves carbon storage and other functions that species diversity alone cannot sustain. The research concluded that conservation strategies should stop focusing only on isolated plots and move on to protecting biodiversity at the basin scale. The results suggest that maintaining or increasing tree diversity improves the ecological services of basins, especially water regulation, and that conservation strategies should operate at the basin scale and adapt to local climatic conditions, Peri stated in the dialogue with Infobae. This It means that in countries like Argentina with good management it is possible to have forestry production in some sectors and at the same time biodiversity can be protected, he concluded.
