Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

permaculture - [permaculture] Where - On Seedballs

permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: permaculture

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: "Lawrence F. London, Jr." <venaurafarm@bellsouth.net>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [permaculture] Where - On Seedballs
  • Date: Tue, 31 May 2011 23:20:53 -0400


Where - On Seedballs
http://sites.google.com/site/onseedballs/where

On Seedballs


Search this site
Contact
WHAT
HOW
WHY
WHO
WHERE WHEN
Restoration projects worldwide

"...(Anywhere) there are seeds missing in the soil. All you have to do is sow seeds."
- Panaoitis Manikis



The information given here is solely intended to provide basic knowledge of the nature of seedballs.

Contents

1 Precipitation patterns
2 Macro scale
3 Meso & micro-scale



Precipitation patterns
This is a very important point. Any research / project / individual who aims at assessing the efficiency of seedballs casting as an alternative plant propagation technique and downplay this critical point will surely conclude that they are not quite that efficient and that would suck big time.

Because you need rain for plants to grow.

Jim Bones gives (a seedball pioneer in the USA)a critical piece of information: "to work well seed balls need to be used in areas that receive at least 10 to 12 inches of annual precipitation, but the timing of the rains is also important. Three to five inches of rain are required to dissolve the seedballs and begin germination. Continued rains are then needed to promote growth and establish viable root systems".

My personal experience shows that less water is needed to "dissolve" the seedballs (1.5 inches in 2009 in Southern California, followed by a couple of overcast fresh days). But wind condition, exposition and other factors are to be taken into consideration. I am pretty sure that it has to do with the surface area/volume ratio of the sphere and that in order to optimize the efficiency of seedballs in drier zones one has to consider the proportion of the components, the size and the shape of the (seed)ball, ()cube, ()ovoid. Moreover, sprouts that originated from seedballs will probably not establish viable root systems if naturally occurring sprouts don't...

This being said, you probably look for more that seedballs sprouting.

As a rule of thumb, therefore 10 to 12 inches (250-300 mm) is a probable minimum (Jim Bones).

That being said, do plants grow only where it rains enough, or does it rain enough only where plants grow ?

In densely vegetated ares such as rainforests plants act a a water pump through evapo-transpiration. Moreover, water vapor has a higher pressure than condensed droplets, so when water evaporates from a rainforest and condenses overhead, a low pressure zone is created, which essentially sucks in wind - and rain - towards the center. Is this cycle, dubbed the 'biotic pump', by Makarieva & Gorshkov (2006a) what Masanobu Fukuoka referred to when he said “Rain doesn’t fall from above. It falls from below (...)”?

To this pump effect one should add the chemicals that tree release and that condense water. Their name given by Willie Smits in his must see TED TALK presentation on an integrated Orang Utan habitat restoration Samboja Lestari in Kalimantan (Borneo) is unclear to me due to his light dutch accent...despite the fact that I lived four years in Holland. It is at 15'42 in the video [maɪkhɪst] If you know, please contact me !
W. Smits achieved through a smart design to get air temperature to fall by 3 to 5 degrees centigrade, cloud cover to increase by 12% and rainfall by 20-25% with the forest cooling the atmosphere and attracting rain clouds.

Willie Smits 'used a Dutch word from (his) studies in tropical forestry "mikisten", which is a general word for substances emitted from the tree leaves such as for instance terpenes. These enhance the formation of rain.' (personnal communication).

After a brief research it turns out that biogenic aerosol do indeed enhance the formation of rain. One Lab is pioneering this research: see Dominik Spraklen at the Institute for Climate and Atmospheric Science at Leeds University, UK.

Re-greening is priming that 'biotic pump'. Using seedballs is the way to do it.

The concept of Biotic pump has been discredited by a paper untitled 'A "Forests as biotic pump” hypothesis discredited due to errors in basic atmospheric physics', Kees Stigter and Agromet Vision, Bruchem, the Netherlands & Bondowoso, Indonesia, and Antoon Meesters, Faculty of Earth and Life Sciences, VU University, Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

They write:

"Local people in many partially forested regions believe that forests “attract” rain, but climatology has no scientific explanation for that belie(f)".

Meanwhile some references ...

Makarieva AM,GorshkovVG (2007) Biotic pump of atmospheric moisture as driver of the hydrological cycle on land .Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci. 11:1013-1033.

Makarieva AM, Gorshkov VG, Li BL (2006b) Conservation of water cycle on land via restoration of natural closed-canopy forests: Implications for regional landscape planning. Ecol Res 21:897-906for that believe (Stigter, 2010).

Spracklen, DV; Bonn, B; Carslaw, KS (2008) Boreal forests, aerosols and the impacts on clouds and climate, PHILOS T R SOC A, 366, 4613-4626. doi:10.1098/rsta.2008.0201

Martin, ST; Andreae, MO; Artaxo, P; Baumgardner, D; Chen, Q; Goldstein, AH; Guenther, A; Heald, CL; Mayol-Bracero, OL; McMurry, PH; Pauliquevis, T; Poschl, U; Prather, KA; Roberts, GC; Saleska, SR; Dias, MAS; Spracklen, DV; Swietlicki, E; Trebs, I (2010) SOURCES AND PROPERTIES OF AMAZONIAN AEROSOL PARTICLES, REV GEOPHYS, 48, . doi:10.1029/2008RG000280

Other very interesting papers

Hildebrandt, A. and E. A. B. Eltahir, (2006). Forest on the edge: Seasonal cloud forest in Oman creates its own ecological niche. Geophys. Res. Lett., 33, L11401, doi:10.1029/2006GL026022.

Hildebrandt, A, .M. Al Aufi, M. Amerjeed, M. Shammas and E. A. B. Eltahir,(2007). Ecohydrology of a seasonal cloud forest in Dhofar: 1. Field experiment.Water Resources Research, 43, W10411, doi:10.1029/2006WR005261.

Hildebrandt, A. and E. A. B. Eltahir (2007). Ecohydrology of a seasonal cloud forest in Dhofar: 2. Role of clouds, soil type, and rooting depth in tree-grass competition. Water Resources Research, 43, W11411,doi:10.1029/2006WR005262.

McAlpine CA et al. (2007) Modelling the impact of historical land cover change on Australia’s regional climate. Geophysical Research Letters 34, http://dx.doi. org/10.1029/2007GL031524.

Macro scale

Long-term average precipitation by month (mm/day and in/day), based on 1961-1990 data.
Mollweide projection.

by
PZmaps
sources: CRU CL 2.0 (New, M., Lister, D., Hulme, M. and Makin, I., 2002: A high-resolution data set of surface climate over global land areas. Climate Research 21: 1–25) and File:Tissot indicatrix world map Mollweide proj.svg by Eric Gaba.

In order to have have an idea of global precipitation spatial patterns, I ran the online tool proposed by the
Global Precipitation Climatology Project (GPCP) -
Data from over 6,000 rain gauge stations, and satellite geostationary and low-orbit infrared, passive microwave, and sounding observations have been merged to estimate monthly rainfall on a 2.5-degree global grid from 1979 to the present.


See: Global Precipitation Analysis Products of the GPCC,
U. Schneider, T. Fuchs, A. Meyer-Christoffer, B. Rudolf,
Global Precipitation Climatology Centre (GPCC),
Deutscher Wetterdienst, Offenbach a. M., Germany, Nov. 2008.

Run model visualizer here

The World


Africa

Oceania

Asia-Indian Subcontinent

South-America

North-America


Europe
Meso & micro-scale
This section will treat basic topography as well as common sense rules in ecological restoration regarding the preferred places.
I have to stress here that I am not a trained ecologist and as such I do not claim to understand scientifically the processes of ecological restoration. I intuitively adhere to the idea that restoring the health of ecosystems using plants involves little more than recreating a rich and diverse seedbed, and let Nature do the rest.
Seedballs do just that.
Once again, precipitation are very important. You can run a query on precipitation patterns at the city scale on Worldclimate(disclaimer: do not use this model for professional or important purpose, including but not limited to agriculture, academic research.


























Sign in Recent Site Activity Terms Report Abuse Print page | Powered by Google Sites



  • [permaculture] Where - On Seedballs, Lawrence F. London, Jr., 05/31/2011

Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page