RE: Re: Forests and wildlands in Heortland, Sartar, Tarsh

From: Sam Elliot <samclau_at_zNqsSNEqGO3CfCIkroUuaDTMUeG5E51-7MAVkl7IckGooqzVd-Lu0bkDPbywGaNekNd5>
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2007 19:55:47 -0300

>Without intermittent small and medium forest fires there won't be any
glades, and no
>saplings, and almost no vertebrate animals, in fact nothing but decrepit
old spruce, and
>eventually you get either disasterous bug-infestations or really huge
forest-fires (which
>incinerates everything in the ground for much greater depth, and actually
damages
>biodiversity) or first bugs, and then huge fire.

Peter:
You can have clearance without fire. In the good old days there were large animals
around to do the clearing but humans have hunted most of them down. In any event,
the gloranthan forests have got elves who are more than capable of finding fresh
spots for trees to grow, eating up the fallen lumber (although they would have to
treat it first) and keeping a check on the undergrowth. This doesn't mean they
are immune to forest fires but such occurences would be similar to a flood or
fire here.

FWIW, gaps in forests which are colonizable by young trees are mostly formed by other trees falling down. This can be due to age, disease, parasitic plants, attack by longhorn beetles, whatever, but the important point is that this happens all the time at all sorts of spatial scales. The most common is likely indivuidual trees falling, taking a few others with them and so creating a gap. Welcome to the wonderful world of population biology. Here's a site which even uses the word "gapology"!: http://www.archbold-station.org/abs/Biennial99/R9Research/R9PlantEcol.htm

The forest can have an identity beyond the individual trees by two mechanisms - trees reproducing via runners (RW runners I mean) so being clonal and connected; mycorrhizae which connect trees, even of different species. Oh, and another mechanism is producing volatiles (apart from that song of course)

Also, plants which require fire to reproduce...this goes waaaaay beyond N. America. Try fynbos and cerrado. I think there are quite a few smaller plants which do this. Try Proteaceae of the smaller varieties. The ones who really profit are termites.

If you want aggressive plants, try invasives. Water hyacinth (the World's Worst Weed), that sedge (Cyperus rotundus), scoth broom, japanese knotweed, wattle (no idea what that is but its from Australia and I know a guy in RSA working on it - bet it's nasty). Elves going abroad to look for classical biological control agents to control nasty weeds in their forest could be a fun one.

Sam being a biologist.