New research into #Ghostroads - informal roads, not officially commissioned or mapped - in #Indonesia and their significant impacts on deforestation.
The wider ecological harm of roads is welll known and we have discussed it here several times already (@davidho @inquiline), but this research is really solid and also interesting to focus in on ghostroads. #Rainforests
#ClimateDiary Now this is a story that has cheered me up (not much, recently). It sounds like a really wonderful, thought-through regenerative #restoration project - tree planting done the right way.
And: it is wonderful to see the efforts of people like Guy Shrubsole, George Monbiot and Eoghan Daltun, campaigning and writing about UK and Irish #rainforests for years, bear fruit. All this work does matter. Spurs me on a bit again! #HistoricalEcology#Devon
Bryony Wilde, project manager at Arlington Court, said:
“Through this tree planting, we’re helping to create a living landscape where both nature and people can thrive. These trees will not only provide a habitat for wildlife but also fix carbon into the soil, purify air and water, and provide a place for people to enjoy.” 💚
Here is Mongabay’s annual recap of major tropical rainforest storylines.
While the data is still preliminary, it appears that deforestation declined across the tropics as a whole in 2023 due to developments in the Amazon, which has more than half the world’s remaining primary tropical forests.
Brazil has proposed a new $250 billion mechanism for conserving the world’s tropical rainforests.
The “Tropical Forests Forever” fund, sourced from governments and the private sector, would disburse money to tropical countries that achieve set thresholds for limiting deforestation.
Ethnobotanist and podcast host of The Plants of the Gods, Mark J. Plotkin, spoke with Mongabay founder Rhett A. Butler on the podcast's newest episode How to Save the Rainforest.
The episode covers everything from Mongabay's origins, Rhett's inspiration for his work, and his views on how best to save rainforests.
He talks about how he takes modern functional programing techniques from all walks, so not just monads, but reproducible builds (e.g. Nix, although Nix is not yet used), and building these very complex data processing pipelines. He talks about how at Cambridge he has to often sit down with scientists to discuss with them how they gather and process data and produce visualizations.
He then takes the code they have written, often in languages like R and Python, and translates the stateless, functional essence of it into OCaml, and then takes the references to the datasets (often hard-coded URLs) and turns them into proper data sources. The OCaml is annotated with symbols that allow for automatic generation of GUIs.
The data sources are incredibly diverse. Many of them come from scientific experiments that have been ongoing for decades, many of the sources come from multiple generations of measuring devices, where older devices give lower-accuracy information and newer sources give higher accuracy. He also talks about the importance of security for some data sources, e.g. the location of critically endangered animals that would almost certainly be poached if photographs of these animals leaked to the public, what with how easy it is to localize nowadays.
He also inspires computer scientists to use their talents to start talking with activists, and possibly even policy makers, directly to learn what their needs are and see how you can apply yout own skills.
WIlliam Byrd was in the audience and during the Q&A session informed the audience of a workshop related to this kind of intersection of technology and activism at the DECLMed workshop ("Declarative Programming for Biology and Medicine") colocated with ICFP2023, so please check that out as well.
India’s ‘Alternative To Hong Kong’ Proceeds In Lush Nicobar Island, As Govt Ignores Pleas Of Local Tribals
Over the past 17 years, and most recently in 2022, hunter-gatherers, fisherfolk & farmers of a Nicobarese tribe—inhabiting a rainforest-draped island of the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago for about 50,000 years—have pleaded with the union government to return them to their ancestral land. But with a Rs 72,000-crore plan to build a giant port, international airport, power plant and tourism facilities by cutting about a million trees in 130 sq km of rainforest, the government has erected a wall of silence to their requests to return home.
When we get out of the glass bottles of our own ego,
and when we escape like squirrels turning in the
cages of our personality
and get into the forests again,
we shall shiver with cold and fright
but things will happen to us
so that we don’t know ourselves.
Cool, unlying life will rush in,
and passion will make our bodies taut with power,
we shall stamp our feet with new power
and old things will fall down,
we shall laugh, and institutions will curl
up like burnt paper.