Tanada wrote:{On Sun 09 Jul 2017}Plant reproduction is based on producing thousands of seeds with the expectation that one or two will germinate and survive long enough to reproduce. An updraft thunderstorm can pick up billions of seeds at a time and carry them along until it loses energy, scattering seeds, dropping some and picking up others as it travels. The tree line hasn't moved very far north yet because the climate is not warm enough to support trees. However as soon as the climate will support trees that will change.
IIRC you live in New Zealand? A few years back I posted about the crazy attempts to eliminate invasive pine tree species from New Zealand, which is currently a high tech battle against nature. None of the types of trees in question were native to New Zealand, and yet because the environment is ideal for them their seeds are colonizing new areas very rapidly. This scares the daylights out of some so called environmentalists who convinced the government of your country to 'fight the invasive species' leading to very large sums of money being spent on public lands. However the trees on private lands are private property and every year they release millions of seeds that wind and birds scatter into areas those threes can grow and prosper. This makes the battle against the invasives nothing but a stalling tactic, sooner or later the government will either run out of money or just give up and when that happens those suitable public lands will become public forest lands. In Denali national Park, Alaska something of the same sort has taken place with Dandelions. Dandelions are native to Europe and have actually been grown as a crop in many places there for centuries. They migrated to the east coast of North America along with the seeds for deliberately introduced European crops like pasture grasses, wheat/oats/rye/barley and because they are excellent wind spread colonizers they made it across the continent to the west coast faster than the Europeans who traveled to the west coast in large numbers in the 19th century. Alaska first received Dandelions around the mid 20th century when Americans started trying to grow hardy grains like Barley near Anchorage and the suburban schtick caused Alaskans to plant lawn grasses imported from the lower 48. As a result Dandelions have been spreading through Alaska for about 7 decades now and about 15 years ago they invaded Denali National Park. I know because at the time the National Park Service put out a plea for volunteers to help them uproot and eliminate the dandelions which are by definition an invasive species in North America. They spent millions of dollars and thousands of man hours sending ranger lead groups of volunteers out in an attempt to eliminate every Dandelion in the park. The problem is Dandelions are now well established all around the southern end of the park, so every year new seeds blow into the park.
I know the Park management and rangers are doing what they believe is best, but could there be anything more labeled as a "First World Problem" than government resources being used in an impossible battle against the power of Nature to spread species around? Especially when there are people suffering from insufficient food and medical resources in the same first world country?
Nature bats last, whenever the well intentioned but pointless efforts finally cease Nature will still be spreading the seeds for all these plants. The article at the link even tacitly admits that well established invasives never go away permanently and require renewed effort every year to control.
Here I am just shy of 2.5 years later and what did I stumble across yesterday?
Trust chair and Southland regional councillor Ali Timms is steamed. The Government owns the pines—and is responsible by dint of history for their planting—but has five times denied the trust funds to control them. The trust itself is a response to that obdurance, a coalition formed in 2007 of DOC and Environment Southland, backed by LINZ and MfE, which have given funding commitments from their own operational budgets.
But a $9 million, 12-year control programme for Mid Dome is still $3 million short, and now central Government has thrown another curve ball at Timms. Under provisions in the Emissions Trading Scheme, the trust could, perversely, be held liable for $3 million in deforestation penalties if it removes any more pines.
“That’s our funding shortfall,” she says, as we climb the hill in a bucking Hilux. “We’ll have to spend that money on carbon credits, instead of taking trees out of Mid Dome. If we’re held liable for these trees, we’ll just be forced to walk away. And that would be a tragic waste of all the years of work, not to mention the money, that has been put into Mid Dome.”
As befuddled climate change policy hobbles the control of wildings, the phenomenon itself is giving them a shot in the arm. According to a 2006 MfE report, contorta is enjoying the warming weather. “Seedlings of Pinus contorta appear to now grow faster than previously,” it notes.
Ethan Gabriel mops up wilding seedlings on Pukaki Downs Station. “I really like trees—they’re beautiful things, living things. These are just in the wrong place. If I thought too much about how they’ve spread all over the place, it would do my head in.”
So the Insanity of this whole scheme to "control invasive pines" has now taken another step into the abyss where one hand of the "green" movement is still dedicated to killing every tree they can while the other hand is planning to punish them for killing trees and releasing the carbon those trees were taking up back into the atmosphere.
If it weren't so tragic it would be gut shaking belly laugh funny.
Oh and the new "cost effective" solution for killing trees is to fit helicopters with very long spray probes that extend beyond the down wash zone from the rotors and pay a pilot to spend his daylight hours flitting from tree to tree selectively spraying them with a combination herbicide. It seems they tried using traditional helicopter spray rigs like you use for crop dusting and the down wash contaminated huge areas to apply enough to kill a tree. They still intend to use that method for large stands of trees, but that immediately drops them back into removing trees releases carbon sequestered by those same trees before they killed them. Not to mention it creates a dead forest that is just perfect for an instant forest fire from the next lightning strike as the dead dry trees go up in flames like magic.
Seriously, is nobody at the DOC aware of reality in any way shape manner or form?
