Sometimes, passing a place where until recently a beautiful forest was rustling, a person asks himself the question: “What happened?”. How did it happen that powerful trees die in a short period of time, leaving only charred skeletons? Unfortunately, despite the apparent power and greatness, the forest can die for many reasons.
Instruction manual
1
The most common cause of tree death is forest fires. You have probably seen more than once an ad that calls not to make bonfires in the forest. It appears in May and is broadcast until the fall. And yet, every weekend, companions of friends, tired of busy workdays, break out of town. Often they take barbecue and alcohol with them, but not everyone brings a shovel to dig around the fire. As a result, the fire of a tipsy company gets out of control, and it is good when woeful tourists manage to get their feet off the fire.
2
Sometimes, in order to make a fire in the forest, it is not even necessary to light a fire An undamped cigarette can cause no less trouble than a bonfire.
3
However, fires are not just the work of human hands. In hot weather, fire can occur on its own. Worst of all, when peatlands burn. Underground fire can extend for kilometers, destroying everything in its path. The difficulty is that burning peat bogs are hard to extinguish, so this is a real disaster for the forest.
4
It’s easy to destroy a forest by breaking a fragile ecosystem. Often, all old trees are removed during deforestation, and young growth remains untouched. This is done, of course, so that after a few years the forest is restored - young trees have grown, their crowns have spread, and the new forest has appeared in all its glory. In fact, it turns out that in old trees live birds that feed on insects. If these trees are cut down, the birds will fly away to a new place, and colonies of bark beetles and other pests will fall on the young growth, which will be able to regale themselves with young trees with impunity.
5
Climate change, which worries scientists around the world, leads not only to the melting of glaciers, but also to unexpectedly increasing populations of parasites, which, due to the warm summer, manage to produce, for example, not three, but five populations. So in 2011, forests near Moscow were threatened by bark beetles-printers, whose population has increased significantly due to warming.
