Why Forest Protection Is Crucial for Our Future

• Forest protection limits the various biotic and abiotic factors or their effects that reduce or degrade forests.
• Plant Science provides the theoretical basis for protecting forests. It focuses on tree morphology, anatomy, physiology, and biochemistry to monitor structure, growth, function, and stress management.
• Advanced precision tools used onsite or remotely estimate several plant parameters non-destructively to help monitor and protect forests.

Forest protection is crucial not only to conserve biodiversity and fight climate change but also for the ecosystem services people enjoy from nature. The severe reduction and degradation of forests due to growing populations and climate change need novel solutions. Plant science is a pathway in a multipronged approach to ensure forest protection. Find out more about one of the crucial challenges of our time and how to mitigate them.

What is Forest Protection?

Figure 1: “An overview of tropical forest degradation processes in the Amazon. Underlying drivers stimulate disturbances (timber extraction, fire, edge effects, and extreme drought) that cause forest degradation. A satellite illustrates the attempts to estimate degradation’s spatial extent and associated carbon losses” Lapola et al. (2023). (Image credits: DOI: 10.1126/science.abp862, Alex Argozino/Studio Argozino)

Forest protection involves creating designated forest areas to maintain biodiversity, habitats, ecosystem services, and livelihoods.

Forests are crucial for people, the environment, and nature. They produce oxygen and are essential watersheds for the water cycle that feeds streams and rivers. Forests regulate the climate, rainfall, and biochemical cycles. Woods are home to 50% of global biodiversity, conserve soil, and sequester carbon. Forests reduce pollution, global warming, flooding, and landslides.

Management approaches seek to maintain these benefits by preventing and controlling forest damage from abiotic and biotic factors.

• The abiotic factors include storms, erosion, fires, pollution, and climate change.
• The biotic factors are pests, diseases, deforestation, resource extraction, livestock grazing, etc.

Forest management can involve managing natural and planted forests so that outputs can maximize benefits, ecosystem services, and products for people and natural communities. Plant stress can change forest structure, functions, biochemical and water cycles, and benefits to society.

Forest protection prevents or reduces the impact of anthropogenic activities like logging, grazing, minor forest product extraction, grazing, or clear-cutting for farmland, see Figure 1. It can involve monitoring onsite and through imagery for damages or maintaining corridors to join fragmented forests.

Deforestation not only reduces tree numbers and species in an area, but it also reduces niches and habitats for various fauna. Even destroying one forest layer or a patch can change dynamics and forest functions that can last decades and centuries. Laws, people’s participation, and forest management can help protect natural ecosystems.

Abiotic factors like extreme weather events, climate change, drought, changing rainfall patterns, landslides, and forest fires can all affect forest growth, productivity, and survival. Events like forest fires can release carbon, and the smoke can be a source of pollution. Forests weakened by adverse environmental conditions are more susceptible to pests and diseases that can change forest cover and species composition. Natural forest destruction is mitigated through restoration, but the resultant secondary forests have different species composition and will differ in structure and function.

Plant Science for Forests

Therefore, it is necessary to know the characteristics of mature and young forests and the effects of growth, stress, or changing climate. Plant science applications can help.

Advanced technology and tools that allow non-destructive practical applications of plant science are available to analyze and measure the various plant features or functions. Technology is instrumental in choosing and promoting suitable environmental and social forest management and protection conditions.

Global Positioning Systems (GPS), remote satellite imagery based on multi- or hyperspectral images, and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for estimating productivity, growth, stress, destruction, or damage are standard large-scale technologies used in forest protection.

GPS is also used for small-scale onsite monitoring. Many techniques are miniaturized in small portable instruments for field measurements, including infrared gas analysis, spectroscopy, scanning, and root imagery. Other techniques can be molecular markers and chromatography-mass spectrometry. Field data are also needed to validate models used in remote sensing.

Modeling, AI, and machine learning are increasingly popular in precision forestry applications for analyzing remote imagery and complex field data.

Plant science aspects that focus on structure, growth, function, and defense are helpful for forest protection.

Structure

Morphology and anatomy study plant structure at various levels, from cells, tissue, and organs to the entire organism. The aboveground vegetative and underground root systems are crucial for forest protection.

Aboveground Structure

Leaves and canopies are standard vegetative aboveground plant parts used in forest protection. The parameters involved are Leaf area, Leaf  Area Index, stem diameter, plant height, and canopy cover.

Leaf area: Leaves are significant organs interacting with the environment and are essential for absorbing light, carbon dioxide, transpiration, and rainfall interception. The CI-202 Portable Laser Leaf Area Meter and the CI-203 Handheld Laser Leaf Area Meter are non-destructive modern tools for morphological studies. Leaf area is used to estimate tree and forest primary productivity. The extent of deforestation or restoration success can also be measured by leaf area.

Leaf Area Index (LAI): The leaf area (m2) per ground area is the leaf area (LAI). It is a standard biophysical parameter often used in forest management modeling to calculate gross primary production. LAI is an indicator of precipitation and radiation interception, carbon fixation, plant water balance, evapotranspiration, microclimate, plant and forest growth stage, and productivity. It varies with forest type and species composition.

Forest canopy cover: For forest protection, canopy cover is an indicator of forest use, deforestation, reforestation, degradation, thinning, fire, pest and disease damage. It is also helpful in estimating microclimate, timber, and hydrology. Onsite forest canopy structure measurements are possible by calculating LAI and canopy cover. Tools like the Plant Canopy Imager CI-110, produced by CID Bio-Science, provide canopy images with wide-angle hemispherical lenses and Photosynthetically Active Radiation (PAR) levels using sensors.

Stem Height and DBH: Stem height and diameter at breast height (DBH) are old and standard measurement units to calculate the productivity and biomass of forests and species. It also indicates the forest story, forest and tree growth stage, and species characteristics. Traditional methods include optical and mechanical instruments like measuring tapes, calipers, and hypsometers. Recent developments are using onsite camera imagery and image processing of individual trees to measure their height and diameter and extrapolate results to the forest.

Underground Structure

Root system parameters are length, diameter, area, volume, depth, branching angle, fine roots, etc. The root traits are typical of species and habits and can stabilize soils and help in rainfall infiltration and the global water cycle. Specific root structural traits are associated with functions. These traits are crucial for natural ecosystems by ensuring rainfall infiltration, reducing landslides, and transferring underground water to shallow soil depths.

Some new non-destructive methods of root traits are root scanners, such as the Minirhizotron CI-600 In-Situ Root Imager or CI-602 Narrow Gauge Root Imager, which are used with installed transparent root tubes to take images and provide information on root traits and dynamics.

Structures, especially aboveground shoot organs, are accessible and easy to measure. Therefore, they have been used for morphologic estimations and as plant function, growth, and stress indicators. Underground measurements are a more recent development and not yet widespread.

Function

Plant functions are studied through physiology at various levels – cells, organs, or entire plants.

Leaves: The leaves have various functions that are helpful to plants, like photosynthesis, transpiration, and stomatal conductance. Infrared gas analyzers like CI-340 Handheld Photosynthesis System give a real-time reading of all three processes simultaneously to estimate carbon fixation and the environmental factors like temperature or drought that could be affecting it. Leaves are also significant for ecosystem-level rainwater interception harvesting and microclimate creation, which can estimated by leaf area, LAI, or forest canopy.

Trunk: Stems and branches transport water and nutrients from roots to the leaves and the fixed carbon to all plant parts. Stems also help plants access light and bear leaves, flowers, and fruits. It also connects all the organs. Transpiration is an indicator of internal water relations in a plant. Phloem transport of food is measured in several ways, such as indicator dilution, pulse labeling of carbon dioxide, and laser-heat-pulse technique.

Reproduction: Flowers and fruits are reproductive in function and help in species propagation and forest regeneration. Studying them requires observation and manual counts. Remote imagery from satellites and drones is used for recording large-scale flowering dynamics, which can be helpful in invasive species management and silviculture.

Underground dynamics: Root functions include anchorage, sourcing and absorbing water and nutrients for trees, and nutrient cycling for the ecosystem. One way to estimate root function is to study root traits closely matched with the function through minirhizotrons.

Death:  Senescence at cell, organ, and tree levels can be necessary for forest protection to evaluate ecosystem nutrient cycling, health, autumn leaf shedding, stress, pest and disease attack, and management. The color changes in leaves can be measured by spectroscopy, either through satellite imagery or handheld tools. The thinning of the canopy due to season, disease, stress, fire, drought, etc, can be measured by canopy cover changes.

Figure 2: “A summary of growth processes across spatiotemporal scales, growth metrics, and measurement methods shows -(a, b) Eudicot leaf area growth, with (a) development of cell number area, visualizing the transition to cell expansion driven leaf expansion, and (b) Leaf area development in dark green as an example of organ expansion. (c) Tree volume growth using the von Bertalanffy growth model and estimated water content. (d) Fluctuation of fresh volume and (e) carbon mass (NSC, nonstructural carbohydrates; SC, structural carbohydrates). (f) Ecosystem primary succession modeled by a Chapman–Richards function shows total carbon mass per unit surface area, and corresponding net ecosystem production (NEP), and Leaf area index curves. (g, i) Net ecosystem exchange (NEE) carbon fluxes for an early and late successional stage plant community (different scales). (h) Annual enhanced vegetation index (EVI) for a deciduous temperate forest.” Hilty et al. 2021. (Image credits: https://doi.org/10.1111/nph.17610)

Growth

Plant growth can mean cell division and increases, or growth of new organs like leaves, fine roots, etc., and an increase in trees’ height or circumference, biomass,  or ecosystem-level net primary production, as shown in Figure 2. It can cover the process from germination to senescence. It can also refer to the increase in biomass of trees and ecosystems. At each level, the physiological processes and environmental drivers can differ. Factors like climate change alter plant morphology and function and affect the development and productivity of forests.

Shoot growth can be measured by leaf area, LAI, forest canopy cover, dry matter content of tissue, and biomass estimations by weight or volume. Underground growth can be measured by an increase in root length, width, area, and fine-root turnover using minirhizotron systems.

Defense Mechanisms

Abiotic and biotic stresses are part of any plant’s life. Plants are adapted to survive in a particular habitat, climate, and floral and fauna community. They develop strategies to survive high temperatures, droughts, flooding, cold, pests, insects, and herbivory. Though some phenotypic plasticity allows them to adjust to variations, plants will not thrive in unsuitable conditions. Stress can harm the health and productivity of individual trees, species, or an entire forest and must be monitored and controlled.

These defense mechanisms can be morphological, biochemical, and physiological and can be used for measuring stress.

Morphology: Leaf loss due to stress, droughts, grazing, or pest attacks can be measured by

leaf area, LAI, or canopy cover. Minirhizotron systems can measure root mortality or lesions.

Physiology: Spectroscopy can detect stress due to drought, temperature, nutrient deficiency, salinity, pests, diseases, and pollution. The CI-710s SpectraVue Leaf Spectrometer is a field instrument that detects physiological and chemical changes due to stress. Remote imagery using multi or hyperspectral and thermal interaction is also popular.

Chlorophyll fluorescence measured by CI-340 Handheld Photosynthesis System is another way to study the effects of internal stress on trees.

Forest health is determined by biodiversity or other functions and processes of interest like productivity, carbon fixation, etc.

Forest Management

Forest management relies on plant science for novel information as scientists dig deeper and extend their research scope to cover more ecosystems and species to enhance protection so that natural ecosystems can benefit the current and future generations of people, plants, and animals. Companies like CID Bio-Science Inc. that offer varied scientific precision tools are vital in continuing research and efficient management of forests.

Sources

Coelho, J., Fidalgo, B., Crisóstomo, M.M., et al. (2021). Non-Destructive Fast Estimation of Tree Stem Height and Volume Using Image Processing. Symmetry, 13, 374. https://doi.org/10.3390/sym13030374

 

Egwumah, F. A., Egwumah, P. O., & Edet, D. I. (2021). Roles of Forest Science and Technology in sustainable management of forest resources. Journal of Research in Forestry, Wildlife and Environment, 13(2), 45-55.

 

Hilty, J., Muller, B., Pantin, F., & Leuzinger, S. (2021). Plant growth: the what, the how, and the why. New Phytologist, 232(1), 25-41.

 

Lapola, D.M., Pinho, P., Barlow, J., et al. (2023). The drivers and impacts of Amazon forest degradation.Science 379,eabp8622(2023).DOI:10.1126/science.abp8622

 

Ryan, M. G., & Asao, S. (2014). Phloem transport in trees, Tree Physiology, 34 (1), 1–4, https://doi.org/10.1093/treephys/tpt123

 

ScienceDirect. (n.d.). Forest Protection. Retrieved from https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/forest-protection

 

Simberloff, D. (1999). The role of science in the preservation of forest biodiversity. Forest Ecology and Management, 115(2-3), 101-111.

 

War, A. R., Taggar, G. K., Hussain, B., Taggar, M. S., Nair, R. M., Sharma, H. C. (2018). Plant defence against herbivory and insect adaptations, AoB PLANTS, 10 (4). https://doi.org/10.1093/aobpla/ply037