environmental enhancement again

[Kondla, Norbert FOR:EX]

Yes, for a specific example of this see Kolev (1998) who reports that one of
Finlands rarest butterflies, Maculinea arion, has become increasingly rare
due to afforestation of sandy ice contact deposits like kames and eskers as
a result of forest fire suppression.  In the absence of natural disturbance
agents, human intervention is needed or many species will be lost at the
same time that some people think they are protecting the environment.

-----Original Message-----
From: Jaakko Kullberg [mailto:jaakko.kullberg at helsinki.fi]
Sent: Wednesday, January 16, 2002 1:30 AM
To: leps-l at lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: environmental enhancement again


I totally agree that preventing forest fires have already caused severe
distruction of open habitats under forests, e.g., in Finland. Most of the
open dry heathlands and forests are almost totally gone as natural habitats.
All the rare species of these biotopes are concentrated to smal airports and
around army bases as you know how efficient they can be in making fine open
biotopes ;-)

Another problem is the fact that earlier cattle kept forest away or atleast
open, now we have only 0,04% of pastured country left that what was
situation 150 years ago. Fortunately roads and bilding and overgrowing of
fields have helped most of the species (!) But how long...

This latter pasturing is critized as "these animals" are not natural in
Finland and the plants are "often ruderal" and could nt inhabit Finland
without human. To be frankly to these "vice people" it is good to note that
the animal and plant communities are not made to survive these days. They
would need much more catastrophic nature in human view: huge forest fires,
small forest fires and some millions of buffaloes wandering here and there
around wih rhinos and mammoths... Who would then talk about ruderal plants,
which amazingle well can stand harsh environment in even northernmost
Europe. We just should to keep as high "good & right species" diversity as
possible. In Siberia there still is something which we in Finland
practically lost during last century...

Dreaming about that,
jaska



 
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