Researchers find elephant extinction could have big impact on atmospheric carbon levels
In findings published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), St. Louis University researchers and colleagues found that elephants create forests that store more atmospheric carbon, sustaining forest biodiversity in Africa. reported to play an important role in Central and West African rainforests, the second largest rainforests on the planet, would gradually lose 6-9% of their capacity to absorb carbon from the atmosphere if the already endangered elephants went extinct. We will lose it and amplify global warming.
Dr. Stephen Blake, assistant professor of biology at St. Louis University and senior author of the paper, has spent much of his career studying elephants. In the current paper, Blake and Fabio Berzaghi, lead author at the time of the study at the Institute for Climate and Environmental Sciences (France), and colleagues, explored how the ecology of giant herbivores strongly influenced carbon retention in African rainforests. It documents exactly what to give.
“Elephants have been hunted by humans for thousands of years,” said Blake. “As a result, African forest elephants are endangered. The argument that everyone loves elephants is not gaining enough support to stop elephant killing. Shifting the elephant conservation debate to the role played by forest elephants in maintaining elephants, and that losing elephants means losing forest biodiversity, also works well as numbers continue to decline. We can add to the firm conclusion that the loss of forest elephants will have a negative global impact on climate change mitigation. The importance of forest elephants for climate mitigation must be taken seriously: their role in our global environment cannot be ignored.”
Elephants play multiple roles in protecting the global environment. In a forest, some trees will have light trees (low carbon density trees) and others will have heavy trees (high carbon density trees). Trees with low carbon densities grow rapidly and reach higher than other plants and trees to reach sunlight. Carbon-dense trees, on the other hand, grow slower, require less sunlight, and can grow in shade. Elephants and other megagrass eaters influence the richness of these trees by eating more of the delicious and nutritious low carbon dense trees than the carbon dense ones. This “thinses” the forest in the same way that foresters do to encourage the growth of their favorite species. This thinning reduces competition among trees and provides more light, space, and soil nutrients to help high-carbon trees thrive.
“Elephants eat a lot of leaves from a lot of trees, and they do a lot of damage,” said Blake. “They strip leaves from trees, tear off entire branches, and uproot young trees, but our data show that most of this damage occurs in trees with low carbon densities. If there are a lot of carbon-dense trees in the forest, there will be one less competitor and the elephant will eliminate it.”
Elephants are also excellent dispersers of carbon-dense tree seeds. These trees often produce large, nutritious fruits that elephants eat. These seeds pass through the elephant’s intestines intact and, when released as dung, are ready to germinate and grow into the largest trees in the forest.
“Elephants are the gardeners of the forest,” said Blake. “They plant carbon-dense trees in forests and weed out ‘weeds’ which are low carbon-dense trees. They do a lot of work to maintain forest diversity.”
“Elephants have multiple social benefits,” said Blake. “Children around the world are playing with stuffed elephants in their bedrooms. African forest elephants are also promoting diversity in rainforests in many ways.”
Based on this knowledge, Berzaghi is now looking to determine what impact other animals in the rainforest have on its biodiversity, and whether they have the same impact as elephants, in the future. I’m looking forward to it.
“The implications of our study go beyond African forest elephants,” said Berzaghi. “Indicating that low-carbon tree leaves are unpalatable to herbivores, these findings suggest that primates and other large herbivores, such as Asian elephants, are also susceptible to the growth of high-carbon trees in other tropical forests. Our aim is to extend this by investigating other species and regions.”
Armed with this vital information, the debate to protect forest elephants in the Congo Basin and West Africa is bigger than ever. Elephant populations have been eliminated from many areas of forest and are functionally extinct in many areas. In other words, the population is so small that it does not have a significant impact on forest ecosystems. Blake calls for greater conservation of forest elephants.
“The illegal killing and illegal trade of elephants remains active,” Blake said. “Once 10 million elephants roamed Africa, today there are fewer than 500,000 and most of the population lives in isolated pockets. Elephants range from wild to endangered, and their numbers have plummeted by more than 80% over the past 30 years.Elephants are protected under national and international law, but poaching is We must stop the illegal killing of forest elephants to prevent their extinction.Now we have a choice.As a global society, we must hunt these highly social and intelligent animals. We can continue and watch them go extinct, or we can find a way to stop this illegal activity.It’s so easy to save elephants and save the planet.”
Original: Can elephants save the planet?
Than: Saint Louis University | University of Burgundy
