Categories: HimalayasRestoration ecology
Monocultures
What are Uttarakhand’s forests pining for?
The story of the pine tree is a long and an interesting one. Widely distributed throughout the Northern Hemisphere, Pinus is a diverse genus of trees. It is an extremely resilient species, and is known to do well Read more…
2 Comments
Nirmalya · September 10, 2018 at 09:28
Nice short write-up describing the defining characteristics of Alaap’s work. p.s. please fix the meters to feet in the second sentence. Thumbs up !
Nirmalya · September 10, 2018 at 09:44
Also I had a query regarding Alaap’s reforestation efforts. While the spread of chir pines with land and climate disturbance is a cause for concern, but it does get its resilience and sturdiness as a local species, and is not really an invasive in that sense.
Has Alaap considered diversifying the chir pine stands with other native conifers by working along with the forest department and the local communities? While planting conifers in the lowest (< 1000m) elevations may not be a good idea, conifers like Bhutan pine (or blue pine, P. wallachiana), Chilgoza (P. gerardiana) are native to the W Himalayan landscape, and an active diversifying process may open up the canopy for other non-conifers as well. There are also other pines which may be available in isolated stands – which the Forest Dept. personnel may be aware of (like densata, armandii, bhutanica, kesiya, etc.), and non-pine conifers – and trying them out may be a worthy effort …
Just some thoughts. Best wishes