Fruit-eating birds help regenerate tropical forests
Published: Monday, Apr 15th 2024, 15:10
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Birds eat seeds, excrete them and thus contribute to the natural regeneration of rainforests. A new study by the Crowther Lab at ETH Zurich shows that there is a decisive obstacle: the fragmentation of the landscape.
The Mata Atlântica, Brazil's Atlantic rainforest, is one of the regions with the greatest biodiversity in the world. However, it is also one of the most fragmented regions. Only 12 percent of the original forest still exists, spread over smaller areas, as the ETH writes in a press release on Monday.
As part of the agreement to restore the Mata Atlântica, 12 million hectares of forest are to be restored or allowed to regenerate naturally. Fruit-eating birds play a decisive role in this. However, highly fragmented landscapes restrict the movement of birds.
The study shows that maintaining at least 40 percent forest cover is crucial for natural regeneration. In addition, the distance between two forest areas must not exceed around 130 meters so that birds can continue to move through the landscape and ensure its ecological recovery.
This means that the researchers also know in which areas the rainforest can regenerate naturally and where trees need to be actively planted to restore it.
The models, which were created using observation data from the Mata Atlântica, show that up to 38 percent more carbon could be stored during the regeneration of tropical forests if wild birds were able to move freely between the forest areas, as the ETH writes.
"We've always known that birds are important, but the scale of these effects surprised us," Thomas Crowther, Professor of Ecology at ETH Zurich and lead co-author of the study, is quoted as saying in the press release. "If we can restore the complexity of life in these forests, their potential for carbon storage increases significantly."
Previous studies suggest that restoring forests in the Mata Atlântica could sequester more than 2.3 billion tons of carbon and that natural regeneration would be 77 percent cheaper than planting trees.
©Keystone/SDA
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