Thursday 2 May 2013

Thickets and Sand Plane Fynbos

The most obvious comparison is the nutrients, due to the thickets being ion a dune and the SPF (Sand Plane Fynbos) being in a ditch.

The next time I look at a forest or piece of nature/land with trees, grass, shrubs and bushes I am definitely going to look at it with a different mindset. make use of my knowledge of the "tool of managing a nature reserve", saying in my mind that piece of land has high and that part has low nutrition.

It is amazing how sea sand ended up on the UWC nature reserve and created such major dunes enough to accommodate such a huge number of imperative biomes.

Basically the reserve is divided into two parts the high and low nutrients, the thickets are the ones that get the high nutrition as opposed to the SPF that are on the poor side of the reserve.

Thickets & High Nutrition:

Thickets basically mean thick! These thickets grow on dunes, they are so many they grow into one another and is literally impenetrable. They are so thisk you can hardly see through them.

The green leaves show that they are getting enough nutrients. They are many on one branch even though they are small, so they contribute to the thick nature of the shrub-like tree.

The lime stones on the ground that is almost visible every where are the prominent examples of the high nutrition. The lime stones are still young, and they accumulate from the sand that has a very clay like texture.

The thickets are very greedy nutrient feeders so they are more likely to absorb most of the nutrients available and store it in their biomass (bodies). Nature can never get this out of them, its virtually impossible. That's where the fire comes in, it would physically rob the thickets from the nutrients and distribute it back to the environment, this way they can now be shared and yet again be grabbed by more growing thickets and stored away, and the cycle goes on.

These thickets use birds and mammals to distribute their seeds and vegetation, this process is called Animal Browsing.


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