Ok, I don't know how to title this about the rain forrest


I was thinking along the lines of cutting off your nose to spite your face masochism or hitting your hand with a hammer to be sure it hurts stupidity, but you make up your mind.

Ok, picture yourself in Woods Hole Research Center. Now you're hearing from your ecofreaks researchers about the irepairable damage to the Amozon rainforest. Now, being the concientious, benevolent, thoughtful researchers of an ecofriendly bend; how do you think you'd study the problem?

Being the evil, greedy, anti-Gaia, right-wing nature-haterI am, you'd think it was MY idea to just start rainforest fires to study them, you'd be wrong. I believe in conserving rescorces, why not study a fire already set?

BUT:

Fire is an important agent of transformation in the Amazon landscape. Every year, low intensity fires burn thousands of square miles of Amazon forest. To study the effects of these fires on the forest, and the forests' ability to recover from repeated burning, Woods Hole Research Center scientists will burn two and a half square kilometers of forest in the transition forest of northern Mato Grosso state, at Fazenda Tanguro in Querencia, from late August into early September.

The goal of this research is to better understand what is the impact of fire on the transition forests, which lies between the tall dense rainforests at the core of the Amazon and the "Cerrado" savannas of central Brazil. According to Daniel Nepstad, a senior scientist with the Center, "By studying the characteristics of fires in this transitional forest on the edge of the Amazon rainforest, Center researchers hope to learn how these accidental fires may affect the vigor, health, biodiversity, and animal habitat in these forests, and in the end, to learn whether recurring fire may threaten the very existence of the forest." Repeated burning of transition forests in the Amazon could cause their eventual replacement by fire-prone scrub vegetation through a process call "savannization."

Ok, it's SCIENCE,

The planned burn provides information that cannot be obtained by studying an accidental or escaped fire. The experiment is being conducted in an area in which researchers have taken many measurements prior to the burning – inventories of thousands of trees to catalogue their species, size, and number, surveys of seedlings, measurements of fuel on the forest floor, censuses of mammals, amphibians, and birds, and monthly measurements of canopy closure at 400 points within each square kilometer of forest. After the burn, a census will be taken of the trees to see how many have survived or how they may be reacting or recovering from the burn; and canopy density will be measured immediately after the fire and at monthly intervals, to monitor the impact of the fire and rate of recovery. Temperature and humidity will be monitored at multiple spots in each forest pre- and post- burn, to detect changes in the microclimate of the forest; and soil moisture will be measured at set points in the parcels at regular intervals, to see how the changes in canopy may effect the water available in the soil. According to Nepstad, "This experiment allows us to measure the impacts of recurring fire on the forest by comparing the trees, the animals, the leaf canopy, and the soil before vs. after the fire."

Couldn't they do the "census" on a place that's already going to be burned?

Sorry, I tried posting about the redudndant, inadvertant, , ,whatever it is about about Libs ruining something instead of using what's already there.

I'm still burnt-out from the RRC inspection- maybe tomorrow will be better.