Resilient Plants Could Hold Key to Adapting Agriculture

from IPS News:



Resilient Plants Could Hold Key to Adapting Agriculture
By Mario Osava


RIO DE JANEIRO, Jan 4, 2011 (IPS/IFEJ) - A vision of "the Apocalypse, everything burnt, turned black from ashes and smoke," was what photographer Mila Petrillo saw when she returned in October to what had been her Eden in the Brazilian municipality of Alto Paraiso, 230 km from Brasilia.

The fires had raged around her home, in a forested area of the Chapada dos Veadeiros, or Veadeiros tableland, a vast area of mountains, rivers and waterfalls, in "many lines of high flames," as the fire roared through the treetops and the ground vegetation.

Less than a month later, when she returned from another trip, Petrillo was stunned by "the awesome power of the green" vegetation and how quickly it had recovered. "I had never seen the Chapada's natural landscapes looking so beautiful, a beauty proportional to the previous devastation," she said.

That swift passage "from hell to paradise" reflects the resilience of the vegetation of the Cerrado, a vast savannah covering two million square km in central Brazil. This capacity to adapt still surprises the photographer, even though she has lived in the semi-arid ecosystem, where the Chapada dos Veadeiros is located, for four decades.

Severe droughts, like the one that struck the area in 2010, periodically cause thousands of wildfires to break out in the Cerrado. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=54033