Nature Protect Tips
Nature Protect Tips
For years protection of nature has been understood in such a way. Lack of agriculture, fences and no trespassers were to ensure safety and prosperity for the protected piece of nature. In fact, such passive protection is often the best way to preserve natural values of the protected area. It usually refers to ecosystems, which have not been transformed by human activity. Such ecosystems do not need man to function and develop.
However, it has appeared, that with years some nature reserves, left without any human integration, have changed and lost the values which were to be protected. After 20 or 30 years of existence some reserves changed significantly, compared to their state at moment of their establishment. There were different plants growing and different animals breeding. How did it happen? The answer is simple. Previous state of the spot must have depended in some way on human activity, mainly agriculture.
For example, by grazing horses, cattle and sheep and by making hay, men limit the growth of high plants, bushes and trees, creating a well- insolated open areas. As a result, plant and animal species adjusted to living in such conditions developed.
Such areas must not be fenced in and left untouched. They must be cultivated. They must be shaped by agriculture, just like they have been shaped for past ages. Unfortunately it often happens that farmers do not graze horses and cattle in the area. This is why naturalists and nature protection organizations must do it instead. Protecting nature by agriculture is called active protection.
Active protection of nature means meddling with nature in order to preserve these natural values, which without human integration would irreversibly disappear. Such protection may be limited to deterring unfavourable transformation and attaining the state of stabilization. If such transformation has already been done, the previous conditions must be reconstructed – this process in called renaturation.
The most far-fetched form of active nature protection is creating a natural ecosystem almost from scratch. In most cases it means getting rid of transformations caused by human activity and creating the ecosystem which best suits to local conditions (climate, soil, waters).
