Quote:
Originally Posted by echinosum
Ph. aurea was introduced to the Azores where it has become an invasive weed and taken over whole hillsides to the detriment of other vegetation. I don't think it is welcome.
In Ethiopia, following massive deforestation, and a chronic shortage of wood for fuel, fast-growing Eucalytus was thought an ideal solution - once. Now it increasingly looks like a serious pest, as it sucks water out of the soil very hard and impedes the restoratoin of the natural vegetation.
You can go to Chile and NZ, and see massive areas of monoculture forestry of introduced species, and little but introduced species in most other areas too. The result is that the native species, both animal and plant, are squeezed out because of habitat loss.
Sure places like Madagascar need a lot of land remediation, as much of the land has been deforested and then become useless even for agriculture after soil damage. But I think you have to be very careful in recommending such things as universal solutions. You need to be sure the plant will not be invasive nor impede the regeneration of the natural vegetation.
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Pytolith (Plant opal, or Silica bady )
Buried under the giant stand of bamboo in northern New South Wales, two Australian soil scientists have made a discovery they believe will help save the planet.
From Southern University, Leigh Sullivan explain the signification on this new discovery. He said, “This is a really old grove of bamboo here. It's been there at least 50 years according to the aerial photographs. So, it's been there a long time shedding leaves onto the ground and when you actually look at the accumulation of the organic matter, what we can see is a really thick spongy layer, full of organic matter in various states of decay. Amongst the decay thousands of tiny capsules of carbon known as plant stones (a particle with silica structure ), invisible to the naked eye and virtually indestructible.
“Plantstone is just like a glass jar that has the carbon inside it and that gets deposited into the soil when the plant dies and, basically, it's very stable,.” another man come from the same University, Jeffrey Parr said, “the carbon is actually enclosed by a silica coating. The silica coating protects it from being decomposed in soils.”
“What we've found is that all this organic matter is accumulated within seven years, which means that the organic carbon's been accumulating at a gold medal rate - one tonne, per hectare, per year.” Jeffrey Parr said.
He further said that the plantstone from the sugar cane richer, and more carbon stored in
Until now, forests have grabbed the most attention as carbon capturers, but hardly any tree types make plantstones and they give off carbon when they're cut down. By contrast, plantstones made by crops and grasses are secured for thousands of years, and if the crop's harvested, then regrown, more new plantstones are created, and they're easy to measure
Sullivan said, you can grow a forest pretty quickly and you can lock up large amounts of carbon pretty quickly. The problem is that that carbon is quite volatile. If you have a fire, a disease, or you want to change the forest back to a paddock, you lose the stored carbon. With plantstone carbon we can actually get the carbon in the crop and estimate it quite easily before it hits the soil.
“This is a bit of a stretch, but if all the arable land on the globe was growing vegetation that had the same plant stone carbon sequestration rates as our best sugar cane, that would actually sequester nearly three billion tonnes of CO2 annually in the globe, which is about 20 per cent of our current rate of atmospheric CO2 increase.”
In fact, early in 1804, phytolith was found in plants. Ehreberg(1866) discover phytolith is different to natural silicate mineral. It is only special in some plants. In the leaves, sheath, inflorescence, shell, there are many minerals, actually it is amorphous silicate body. Most of phytoliths are content more carbon. The size of phytolith are different with different plants. Most are about 1 microns. But bamboos’ size is as below: length = 18.8 um (+-0.8um), width=11.7um(+-0.4um), height=11.8um (+-0.3um).
Sorce: MORPHOLOGY OF PHYTOLITH INBAMBUSOIDEAE(GRAMINEAE)
AND ITS ECOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE. L i Quan, Xu Deke, LuHouyuan. Institute of Geology and Geophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing. Graduate University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing