Excerpt
ONE way of looking at vegetation is as an interaction between soil and water. Whatever affects one of these affects the others. The landscapes we see are the result, from old-growth forest to the most barren wasteland. Habitat value should be explicitly recognized as a measure of successful efforts to conserve soil and water, and it is critical to the larger goal of conserving remaining resources and restoring lost values.
Deforestation is a major landscape alteration, usually accompanied by accelerated soil loss and runoff, reduced recharge, and declining water tables. These dramatic shifts continue with spreading human use, such as agriculture or settlement. Exploitation of groundwater quickly follows. Much alarm has been expressed at the magnitude of these trends, yet the full implications of what is occurring have yet to be fully grasped by people generally or even by experts. Meier has calculated, for instance, that the sea level rise we may expect by the year 2050 from melting of snow and ice due to global warming may be less than what we expect from the water being dumped into the oceans from increased runoff, reduced storage …
Footnotes
Leslie Sauer is a landscape architect and principal, Andropogon Associates, Ltd., Ecological Planning and Design Consultants, 374 Shurs Lane, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19128.
- Copyright 1991 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society
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