They note that the process is so quick because there was already a large untouched forest next to it. So any deforestation next to a forest can be fixed quickly, but it would have to creep its way inward over a longer time if there was no forest nearby.
In some cases, yes. Ecosystems are resilient to moderate damage but almost impossible to fix after severe damage.
Normally you will not have a winning combination of very fertile soil, water, forest near to provide recruitment of plants and animals and private land with strictly not allowed arsonists of any kind.
England was deforested. And so was New England. People were burning wood and making charcoal.
Then coal and oil took over, and the forests regrew.
Edit: my experience in Northeastern Massachusetts is that it takes about fifty years for cultivated land to grow up into fifty foot white pines. In another hundred years the climax forest of oak, ash, maple, and beech would take over.
It will depend on if the farmland still has viable soil and water. If the topsoil has blown away or if it is now desert relying on irrigation, it is going to take longer to regenerate. You also end up with things like salt, where water mismanagement has caused a high level of soil salinity and you are going to need specialist plants to regenerate.
40 years of ecosystem recovery from a vantage point (Landsat) in a 6 minute video about Mt St Helens post 1980 eruption: https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/13614
Recently, I've been thinking about "City Country Fingers," a way of integrating urban and agricultural land found in Christopher Alexander's "A Pattern Language." You can read his description of the pattern here: http://iwritewordsgood.com/apl/patterns/apl003.htm
With the Monks Wood rewilding in mind, I wonder how we could transition urban areas toward a city country finger pattern. Though perhaps there should be three kinds of fingers: city, agriculture, and wilderness. Alexander's "country" is just farmland, though he envisions its recreational use too.
The part of Northeastern Connecticut where I grew up has experienced a happenstance version of this. It's a densely wooded area. As a kid, exploring in the woods you'd always find stone walls, old rusted out trucks from the 30s, the foundations of old houses, etc. I assumed the stone walls were from colonial times and that the trucks had been driven deep into the woods and abandoned. It blew my mind when I learned that in fact the whole area had been farmland just 60 or so years before. Those trucks were left to rot in a field. Those stone walls were at the border between fields. And the forest came back pretty quickly and reclaimed it all.
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[ 212 ms ] story [ 1269 ms ] threadNormally you will not have a winning combination of very fertile soil, water, forest near to provide recruitment of plants and animals and private land with strictly not allowed arsonists of any kind.
England was deforested. And so was New England. People were burning wood and making charcoal.
Then coal and oil took over, and the forests regrew.
Edit: my experience in Northeastern Massachusetts is that it takes about fifty years for cultivated land to grow up into fifty foot white pines. In another hundred years the climax forest of oak, ash, maple, and beech would take over.
With the Monks Wood rewilding in mind, I wonder how we could transition urban areas toward a city country finger pattern. Though perhaps there should be three kinds of fingers: city, agriculture, and wilderness. Alexander's "country" is just farmland, though he envisions its recreational use too.
We should do a lot more of this everywhere.
Did a few years of chain cutting young tree and juniper saplings down and let it be grazed by neighborhood livestock.
Then we stopped clearing the saplings.
Fifty years later, it’s all been heavily reforested, many with huge 40-45yo maple, birch, and douglas fir.
Still have the old light aircraft photo of entire land. Looks nothing like Google Earth now.
But it is a great hunting and forage (mushroom) land now.