Posted By crates on January 23, 2009

         It has been unusually cold the past few weeks, staying down in the thirties, with a thick fog veiling the forests and sea.  There has been no rain, but I have noticed that beneath the great Douglas Fir trees and the Big Leaf Maples the ground is wet as if a rain has fallen.  This is especially noticeable on my driveway and on the streets.  Apparently the trees act like great traps that catch and condense the water from the fog which then drips down onto the ground.

This has been noticed before of course and is especially prevalent in Cloud Forests, a term which generally refers to tropical montane forests that occur at the level where clouds sweep in and condense upon the vegetation.  Cloud forests can capture water that would not fall as rain.  The extra water strained from the clouds can amount anywhere from 20 to 60 percent of the normal rainfall, and often provides essential water not only to plants and animals but also to cities. There are often epiphytic plants and moss growing on the tree limbs, and the forest often contains unique species found nowhere else.

Fewer than twenty percent of this incredible diverse assemblage of species has been described, but tens of thousands more exist.  The simple fact is that 80-90% of the cloud forest’s resource is a mystery according to Percy Nunez, a research biologist in Cuzco, Peru as quoted in this article in National Geographic News. And we may never know what treasure exists in these forest since they are disappearing at a rapid rate.  The article written in 2001 predicted that in ten years time, most of the cloud forest will be gone.

The fact that we must face is that our species is causing not only the mass extinction of unique forms of animals and plants but also the extinction of unique ecosystems which is even worse.  Such unique assemblages are the result of long eons of evolution and can never be replenished in a few short years.

Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: cloud forest, extinction