Reservoirs Cause rainfall

A few bits and pieces.

It is said (not by me but other people) that 40% of the rain in the Amazon Basin is caused by the trees themselves.

Trees may not reduce flash flooding but they certainly reduce soil erosion.

When I was in primary school (Oooo! That was a long time ago. Ed ) a teacher told me that the Sahara was once covered with trees but that early Homo Sapiens by cutting down trees, together with climate change, decimated the forests. It's a fact that there are still crocodiles in a few isolated pools in the middle of the Sahara. The crocodiles certainly didn't walk there: they were left there when the jungly bits disappeared around them. There are also in the Sahara, cave paintings of jungly creatures on the walls.

 

Not sure you can apply the same ideas regarding the Sahara to the uk, we are unlikely to turn into a desert, but chopping down all the trees.
In fact most land "management" in this country seems to be based on stopping trees growing, which lets face it, would be our native ground cover.

 

When I was a kid, I remember well there was a big experiment took place on the north yorks moors not far from where I lived. At seemingly random intervals on the open moor, square areas were fenced off with wildlife resistant fencing (wood + mesh), and those squares were not to be touched for some interval (a few years, I seem to think 2 years was mentioned but it might have been a bit longer).

Nothing was planted or sown in the squares, and nothing was removed. It was all part of the experiment. Incidentally I know the details of it because that too was part of it. Whoever was running the experiment (the national park authority presumably) knew that kids interfere with things, so they'd got the schools in on it so we were all aware.

Guess what happened? All sorts of things started to grow in the squares. Flowers, shrubs, and young trees. All just shot up in no time. Eventually the experiment ended and the fences were taken down. The sheep moved back in, and the toffs resumed their annual decimation by fire so that the grouse have nowhere to hide management regime and now it is once again just a standard, run of the mill, area of outstanding unnatural beauty. Ie, sheep+heather+large areas of burnt out charred earth.

 

Something similar happened after the foot & mouth disease outbreak. With grazing levels drastically reduced, many upland plants were able to grow up and flower in far greater numbers than normally. Unfortunately, the effect was very short lived, due to rapid restocking.

I think there would be a lot of wildlife (& other) benefits from removing sheep from large areas of the uplands. The crazy thing is that a lot of the sheep farming is barely economic anyway, and only survives due to subsidies. I suspect we'd see a much great benefit from cutting these subsidies than from all the billions spent in agri-environment schemes generally, plus potential economic benefits from e.g. reduced flooding downstream with more wooded catchments.

 

I've always said, if I woke up one morning and found that by some freak circumstance I was the gaffer of Britain, one of my first new laws would be to ban people from allowing sheep to graze the moors.

 

When GC seizes power, you will be Minister of Re afforestation and not letting things graze it all off

 

Is GC HQ planning a coup d'etat in 2013 ?

GC HQ

 

'Twas the introduction of the ruddy "Sheeps" that resulted in the highland clearances and why there are so many deserted villages in northern Scotland. That's just the human aspect.The ecological impact was even wider.

 

As far as I know in the UK we have very little wild landscape, its nearly all been controlled by man or used in the past..
Lots of the so called countryside is just man made, even the woods are managed or planted.
Around this part of the country as soon as nature takes over a piece of land it's very quickly regarded as wasteland and the builders move in.

We are too small to have wild woods etc.
Even much larger countries are finding it more and more difficult to keep their real native flora and fauna untouched, most of ours was killed off years ago.

 

Probably true. Maybe we can't get everything back that was once here, but if enough of us try to help a little bit, I bet collectively we can make a massive difference for the better.

Here's a thing. I once read (or saw in a documentary) that up until WW2 we'd lost quite a few wildflower species entirely. It was only one the ground was turned over by aeriel bombardment that wildflower seeds that had been dormant in previously undisturbed ground for hundreds of years finally got the chance to germinate.

 

We have people like the National Trust, bringing in horses to chalk areas in order to retain grazed land, apparently it helps plants like wild orchids, certain butterflies that need that kind of habitat and would die out without the animals grazing.

I'm not saying who is right and who is wrong, I just think the whole thing is mixed up and these areas have been grazed for so long they are now trying to maintain the alien environment from a few centuries ago.

 

I've got a feeling tree cover helps to produce rain, trees transpire large amounts of water into the atmosphere, but only when in leaf.
And of course, I think none of this applies to a country sitting on the eastern side of the second largest ocean in the northern hemisphere.
Prevailing westerly winds and all.