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The Return of Krakatau's Rain Forest
| Article
# : |
19650 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1991 |
2,835 Words |
| Author
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Nicholas B. Carter
Nicholas B. Carter is a doctoral candidate in zoology at Ohio
State University. |
The destruction of tropical rain forests at the hands of human beings is proceeding at a rate of 50 to 100 acres every minute, and there are no signs that the pace is about to slacken. While scientists, politicians, and world leaders continue to quibble over the exact rate of deforestation, the principal international concern is the long-term effects of the destruction due to loss of biological diversity and changes in global climatic change processes.
Understanding the complex processes at work in a richly diverse, mature rain forest is vitally important if scientists are to provide wise counsel to policymakers determining the fate of the remaining tropical rain forests. Even if the chain saws and bulldozers were to stop today, no one knows how the cleared areas will recover; if in fact, they do recover.
Predictions from the scientific community are varied. Governments, businessman, and logging companies have always seen this as a weakness in the contentions of conservationists. If scientists cannot agree among themselves, the argument goes, how then, can anyone else believe their forecasts about rain forests? More devastating still is the lack of direct evidence, and hence knowledge, of the natural processes and their rates that lead to the recovery of a natural forest. Most studies are based on single assessments of forest recovery following disturbances of unknown, or guesstimated, intensity. Often such studies are interrupted by the return of humans and the renewal of disturbance.
Even as researchers and decision makers debate the effects of destroying the world's rain forests, important insights into reforestation dynamics are being obtained from long term studies of reforestation on the Krakatau island group in Indonesia.
On August 27, 1883, one of the largest natural explosions ever recorded rocked the Krakatau island group in the strait between the Indonesian islands of Java and Sumatra. Tsunamis (tidal waves), emanating from Krakatau, swept onto the main-lands of Java and Sumatra 28 miles away claiming 36,000 lives. The volcanic eruption sterilized the Krakatau islands, completely eradicating all vestiges of life, and reduced the main island, now called Rakata, to one-third its previous size. Since that eruption Rakata has been left remarkably undisturbed and uninhabited, due to the absence of freshwater. Rakata is currently covered with what may seem on cursory inspection, like a lush tropical rain forest, including a dense canopy of trees, which closed up only 40 years after the eruption. To any casual
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