inhabitat.com — Your local retailers protects themselves by electronically tagging merchandise and keeping a hawk’s eye on inventory, and Helveta, a British tech company, feels that forests can benefit from the same methods. So far, the company has hammered plastic barcodes onto a million trees across Africa, southeast Asia and South America.
Jul 16, 2009 View in Crawl 4
artwhiteJul 16, 2009
Buried... We're in a global-cooling trend
radicaldementiaJul 17, 2009
Unfortunately in a way we've already passed that point. One of the strengths of the rainforests is their incredible diversity. Many species only occupy a few acres, in fact some species of beetles and ants are entirely found on a single tree. Not only has the deforestation of rainforests resulted in incalculable losses of species (possibly in the quintuple digits), but in doing so it is creating genetic bottlenecks. Even if we replant all the trees we can't being back those species, and the areas that regrow will be far more susceptible to environmental changes. Of course evolution will eventually bring back this diversity, but that will take millions, if not tens of millions of years.
radicaldementiaJul 17, 2009
FTA:"Put simply, it’s not the barcode itself that deters would-be tree-stealers, it’s the fact that leaving the forest carrying a huge log without a barcode is very difficult to do - hopefully so difficult that it’s no longer worth it to criminals."
vaultJul 17, 2009
What a silly, expensive idea. Barcoding millions of trees...