Forest fires are a real drama for the environment in most of the world because they cause the loss of many living forms, animal and vegetable, starting a fast degradation of the territory, due to rains and winds erosion that deplete its superficial fertile layer and make it drier, infested by minor vegetable species (like bramble bushes) and subject to landslides.Every year, fires destroy from 60,000 to 140,000 Km2 of forests, either temperate and tropical, releasing in the atmosphere enormous amounts of CO2 and particulate, leaving the soils exposed to a progressive erosion and desertification. Fires are mostly caused by man to obtain free areas for pasture, intensive agriculture or buildings; also the reaction of criminals against the protection measures adopted for a forest area is a likely cause of fires, like the madness of pyromaniacs who love watching the fire burning forests and all the mess this drama creates. Spontaneous fires are rare and are caused by lightnings during summer periods in relatively temperate regions as it happens nearly every year in Yellowstone N.P. and in other similar regions of the Rocky Mountains, where forests are formed by conifers, highly flammable during hot and dry periods for their high resin content.
In these cases, these periodic fires can have a positive ecological role, provided that they are not too frequent in the same area, until depleting too much the soil and making impossible the growth of new bushes and trees. A forest, in fact, can regenerate itself for the free space created by the fire to new plants and trees that can grow up at the place of the oldest trees, burned or fallen down. The same regeneration can occur in tropical dry forests at the limits of the savanna, where fire is caused by self-combustion for the action of intense solar light on bushes resins and for the friction among dry herbs and branches, but these fires are most frequent just in the savanna. This regeneration takes place only if forests are NATURAL and featured by a high bio-diversity (that means healthy), not formed by dense human-made plantations of the same tree species, only because the fastest to grow or the cheapest to use, but this is a delicate equilibrium, easy to break if the climate becomes drier and hotter for several years, as it's happening in the last decades for the global warming, or when man interferes preventing new trees growth. The global warming of our planet is increasing the fires in the world, caused by man who
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Although forest fires cause problems, or even tragedy, for humans, they are essential in the maintenance and development
Forest fires are a real drama for the environment in most of the world because they cause the loss of many living forms,
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How forest fires help ecosystems and forests
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