How to Keep Nature Thriving
By Ariana Pelletiri, WELLKIND Forestry Intern
Ariana Pelletiri was an intern for WELLKIND Forestry during our summer 2021 session, exploring the importance of biodiversity and other crucial environmental topics.
In this internship, I have learned a lot about how innovative strategies in habitat management are necessary in a climate-changed world. To keep pace with today’s threats to forests, habitat management work must focus on increasing biodiversity and restoring and maintaining the soil moisture and health necessary for plants and ecosystems to thrive.
One key component is keeping the soil healthy with enough nutrients and moisture. In an ecosystem, the nutrients flow in a balanced cycle between the animals and the plants. The animals receive their nutrients from eating plants and then dispose of unused nutrients through their feces. This makes animal waste a natural fertilizer for plants in an ecosystem. In comparison to synthetic fertilizers, animal manure is more effective because it takes more time for the plant to absorb the nutrients, has no side effects, and increases the soil’s carbon sequestration.
However, the quality of soil and soil nutrients is decreasing due to losses in animal populations, especially bird populations. Restoring the natural animal interaction with the land is the best solution for an ecosystem’s health.
The balance between plants and animals is vital for the soil to be healthy and to avoid desertification. As Jared Holmes, an ecologist for the Bamberger Ranch in Texas, told us, “Every animal has a role and its own set of nutritional needs.” An ecosystem is the most productive when animals graze and release their droppings on the land. When the animals are removed from the ecosystem, the soil and the plants suffer.
This was demonstrated when ecologist Allan Savory decided to exterminate all elephants in an area in Africa because he thought that the elephants were grazing too much on the land and stunting the growth of the trees. The results were different than expected. Allan thought that the plants would flourish without the elephants grazing on it; however, desertification occurred in their absence. This was because the elephants provided nutrients to the plants through their feces (Savory, 2013).
This is an example of a trophic cascade, where the removal of the tertiary consumers harms the population of organisms in the lower trophic levels, disrupting the balance of the ecosystem. An innovative solution to maintaining a healthy ecosystem is to use domesticated species as alternatives to the animals that have disappeared. As Jared Holmes told us, “What matters is how you use those animals to mimic what mother nature would do.” Herds of goats, for example, can improve the soil with their grazing and waste.
Humans can restore the land to its natural biodiversity in different ways. There are two main routes of restoration. You can start by supporting the producers on the bottom of the trophic pyramid and restore up the levels, or start restoring down from the tertiary consumers and apex predators at the top. As Jared Holmes stated, “it depends” whether ecosystems are controlled from the bottom up or the top down. So, “You have to understand how energy flows through an ecosystem” in order to have the most productivity possible.
At Bamberger Ranch Preserve in Johnson City, Texas, people have been continually restoring the land and are bringing back biodiversity. Texas used to be a grassland savannah that would be balanced from control from the bison, but then farms changed the ecosystem. David Bamberger started restoration on the ranch by working from the bottom up. People cleared trees in certain areas where they weren’t supposed to be and planted native grasses. They restored the natural balance of producers on the land, bringing back native birds and other animals. People also replaced the void from the loss of bison. The ranch’s staff flooded the creek to create wetlands similar to those that bison use to make. This brought back once-vanished species of frogs and turtles.
As nature changes more due to human activity, habitat management is becoming increasingly important in order to restore the land to a healthy and natural ecosystem and for the world to support life for many generations to come.
Further reading
Allan Savory: How to fight desertification and reverse climate change