Sep 04 2009
Ecosystem Regeneration
Here is a fun post from the Economist’s Green.view blog:
http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/displayStory.cfm?story_id=14340926
and a linked article: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0005653
The article states:
“Ecosystems exposed to more than one pressure, such as a forest that is first felled and then used for agriculture, took the longest to recover. Even in those cases, though, the average recovery time was, at 56 years, within a human lifetime. Sites that experienced single threats typically recovered in less than 20 years. The researchers found that recovery rates are influenced more by the type of ecosystem than by the magnitude of the damage inflicted upon it. Forests, for example, take longer to renew (42 years) than ocean floors (typically less than ten) regardless of the scale of the stresses inflicted on them.”
The linked article looks at ~250 sites (only 3 of them mining), but leaves a fairly rosy view of mining (see Fig 4). I suspect this is a “bit” on the optomistic side, but interesting none the less.
H Jones, O Schmitz, 2009
If you’re procrastinating like I am, there are some interesting comments on the Economist blog too.