Deforestation: Wounds in the rainforest persist for more than 40 years

For more than 20 years, a research group has studied a piece of forest in the West African Ivory Coast to determine whether and if so, how quickly the ecosystem returns to its original state after clear-cuts. Is. in trade magazine »Forest Ecology and Management« Now come to the end: probably not at all. For example, even after more than 40 years of deforestation, some species of frogs still haven’t regressed. Some may no longer immigrate in the near future, even though neighboring forest areas are still intact.

The team around the Ivorian Tokouaho Flora Kpan focused on frogs because amphibians are good indicators of an ecosystem’s integrity as they often have very different location requirements. The fact that 4 of the 33 frog species still haven’t returned to the wild in Taas National Park, where the wood was harvested in 1970, is a worrying sign for the team’s scientists.

Until now, forestry assumed that it would take about 30 years to renew a forest and “you can only think of using it again economically,” said co-author Raphael Ernst of the Senckenberg Natural History Collection in Dresden. it is said. “Now we see that it will probably take 40 to 60 years for the original ecosystem to be restored to its depth and breadth.” Above all, the large trees that give the structure will be missing in the re-growing forest.