Abstract
THE United States has now awakened to the serious position brought about by the excessive felling and destruction of forests during the last fifty years. A great campaign is taking place with the object of impressing upon the people the valuable results to be expected from soil conservation and forest conservation, which are now regarded as national problems. The work of Mr. C. A. Connaughton of the U.S. Forest Service is commented upon in a recent communication from Science Service, Washington, D.C. This investigator has studied more than 3,000 test plots in burnt-over forest land, comprising both cut-over areas and virgin timber. In general, the more severe the fire the more severe also was the subsequent erosion. On the steeper lands, lightly burnt areas, on which the fire took only the top layer of the forest floor litter (the ordinary leaf fire, so termed), little erosion was perceivable, about 10 per cent of such plots being eroded. In the case of severe fires, so high as 80 per cent of the plots showed erosion. Mr. Connaughton's research would appear to merit attention from officers connected with these matters in the British Empire. “Of course,” says the author, “where soil is eroded away from a burnt-over forest site, it is difficult to make trees grow there again impossible, if the erosion is severe enough to lay bare the underlying rock. But the damage is apt to be felt by people who never see or think about the forests. Hundreds of miles away, the freshets that gush through the erosion gullies accumulate as floods, in the greater rivers, piling out of their banks to wreak destruction, and leaving behind them, on lowland farms and industrial areas, burdens of silt that should be up in the hills, growing trees.” This might have been written in connexion with the outer Punjab hills. The paper is given in full in the current issue of the Journal of Forestry.
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Soil and Forest Conservation in the United States. Nature 137, 428 (1936). https://doi.org/10.1038/137428b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/137428b0