Creative_soja OP t1_j1p5b1a wrote
Reply to comment by Cryptid_Chaser in Logged forest compared with an unlogged forest could be better for climate change. A detailed assessment of vegetation growth, bird and mammal numbers, and energy flows in logged and unlogged forests offers some surprising findings. by Creative_soja
Oh sorry. I am using my university network with free access, so I didn't realize that.
From the professional summary of the study:
Researchers "put a huge amount of work into calculating the number of individuals for 144 bird species and 104 mammalian species. They did this in adjacent areas of undisturbed and logged forest in Malaysian Borneo. At 882 locations, the authors installed camera traps — devices that automatically take pictures when animals pass by. In addition, Malhi and colleagues captured small mammals at 1,488 positions; installed bat traps at 336 sites; and counted birds at 356 locations."
"Surprisingly, the logged sites had a greater number of speciea than the unlogged sites. For example, logged forests had more species of bird that eat insects or that eat plant material such as fruit and nectar than did the unlogged forests. The authors estimated energy flows through food consumption, and found higher values for logged forests than for unlogged ones. Perhaps logging opens up extra environmental niches that help to boost the forest ecosystem."
So, it seems pretty extensive. I have added the link to the original study.
Cryptid_Chaser t1_j1p84ue wrote
Thanks for the link! Open access FTW!!
Looks like the relevant part from the methodology is: >“in four old-growth forest 1-ha plots in the Maliau Basin Conservation Area (two plots, 4 years of data) and Danum Valley Conservation Area (two plots, 2 years of data)14,16, and one 0.36-ha mature oil palm plot”
So not very large. That’s disappointing, really. I wish they had been in miles-long tracts.
Creative_soja OP t1_j1paast wrote
I agree but it was only research. For them, documenting the biodiversity of a small plot was challenging in itself. Measuring miles of tracts is nearly impossible for a single study. I support huge government efforts to monitor the biodiversity of an entire ecosystem onna regular basis.
Cryptid_Chaser t1_j1pc5gk wrote
True. I’d hate to research an area even that big and try to be comprehensive. And they tracked a lot of different species. No doubt it was a complex project.
I just always think about what the takeaways might be. And I don’t want the takeaway to be “oh let’s log ALL the forests, since we value having a lot of species, so forget about that one frog that only grows here.” If we had even 50/50 old growth and second growth, then it wouldn’t feel so precarious.
Darwins_Dog t1_j1pvbi7 wrote
Given the scope if what they were measuring, this is huge. More or bigger sites would have taken an army to process the images and check all the traps.
Greypilgrem t1_j1pvc4q wrote
In an ideal world sure. However, that would be an unimaginable amount of field work and data analysis. Imagine how many photos are taken by motion activated cameras when the wind blows, not to mention changing out the batteries.
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