https://e360.yale.edu/features/abandoned-lands-restore-biodiversity
"Gergana Daskalova was nine months old when she was taken in by her
grandparents in their small village in Bulgaria. It was soon after the fall of
the Iron Curtain, and her parents had left for the city after the closure of
the village’s state-run collective farm.
She grew up in a countryside emptying of people and with large areas of
farmland lying abandoned. She eventually left too, traveling abroad and forging
an academic career as an ecologist. But she never forgot her home village,
where her childhood saw an ecological transformation paralleling the social
one. As people left Tyurkmen, in Plovdiv province in southern Bulgaria, nature
returned with a vengeance.
“Over the last three decades, I have seen Tyurkmen change as houses were
abandoned, gardens engulfed by vegetation, and birds like pheasants and hoopoes
became a more common sight than people,” she says. “The brambles are so thick,
stepping on them feels like a trampoline. Looking back, it was these changes
that inspired me to study ecology.”
But while most ecologists prefer to study pristine places, Daskalova has become
one of a rising group of researchers focusing on the previously neglected
ecology of abandoned land. She believes these neglected and often despised new
wildernesses could be a crucial part of the planet’s salvation. If only we
noticed and tended them, she says, they offer great opportunities for meeting
both climate and biodiversity targets.
Abandonment, she says, is a “silent driver of biodiversity change. Yet there is
still so much we don’t know about its imprint on the planet.” From her current
research base at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in
Austria, Daskalova is working to change that, both globally and back home,
where Bulgaria is a case study in the impact of population decline."
Via
Future Crunch:
https://futurecrunch.com/226-eighth-continent/
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
