‘Earthworm Dilemma’ Has Climate Scientists Racing to Keep Up
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/20/science/earthworms-soil-climate.html
Source: By Alanna Mitchell, The New York Times.
Excerpt: Cindy Shaw, ...while conducting a study in northern Alberta to see how the forest floor was recovering after oil and gas activity, ...saw something she had never seen there before: earthworms. “I was amazed,” she said. “At the very first plot, there was a lot of evidence of earthworm activity.” Native earthworms disappeared from most of northern North America 10,000 years ago, during the ice age. Now invasive earthworm species from southern Europe — survivors of that frozen epoch, and introduced to this continent by European settlers centuries ago — are making their way through northern forests, their spread hastened by roads, timber and petroleum activity, tire treads, boats, anglers and even gardeners. As the worms feed, they release into the atmosphere much of the carbon stored in the forest floor. Climate scientists are worried. “Earthworms are yet another factor that can affect the carbon balance,” Werner Kurz, a researcher with the Canadian Forest Service in Victoria, British Columbia, wrote in an email. His fear is that the growing incursion of earthworms — not just in North America, but also in northern Europe and Russia — could convert the boreal forest, now a powerful global carbon sponge, into a carbon spout....
Source: By Alanna Mitchell, The New York Times.
Excerpt: Cindy Shaw, ...while conducting a study in northern Alberta to see how the forest floor was recovering after oil and gas activity, ...saw something she had never seen there before: earthworms. “I was amazed,” she said. “At the very first plot, there was a lot of evidence of earthworm activity.” Native earthworms disappeared from most of northern North America 10,000 years ago, during the ice age. Now invasive earthworm species from southern Europe — survivors of that frozen epoch, and introduced to this continent by European settlers centuries ago — are making their way through northern forests, their spread hastened by roads, timber and petroleum activity, tire treads, boats, anglers and even gardeners. As the worms feed, they release into the atmosphere much of the carbon stored in the forest floor. Climate scientists are worried. “Earthworms are yet another factor that can affect the carbon balance,” Werner Kurz, a researcher with the Canadian Forest Service in Victoria, British Columbia, wrote in an email. His fear is that the growing incursion of earthworms — not just in North America, but also in northern Europe and Russia — could convert the boreal forest, now a powerful global carbon sponge, into a carbon spout....