Reforesting fallow land: a false sense of security?

The idea of turning abandoned farmland into plantations is one of the strategies being considered to achieve the goal of planting 2 billion trees by 2030 in Canada. Uncultivated agricultural land can capture as much carbon as land that has been reforested The federal government has committed to planting 2 billion trees by 2030 in order to reduce the amount of atmospheric_CO2 and slow global warming. With this in mind, the idea of using abandoned farmland to plant some of these trees seems like an obvious and interesting strategy, but work by a team of scientists has shown that it is not.However, work carried out by a Quebec research team shows that one should be wary of the obvious. A study published by the team in the journal Plant and Soil found that uncultivated land, where natural plant succession occurs, can capture as much carbon as land planted with white spruce. Mélina Thibault and évelyne Thiffault, from the Department of Wood and Forest Sciences and the Centre for Research on Renewable Materials at Université LavalUniversité Laval, Yves Bergeron of the Université du Québec en Abitibi-Témiscamingue and the Université du Québec in Montreal, and Rock Ouimet and Sylvie Tremblay of the Ministère de la Forêt, de la Faune et des Parcs, demonstrated this by studying 49 former agricultural lands in the region.They studied 49 former agricultural lands in Abitibi that had been abandoned for periods ranging from a few years to five decades. Researchers measured the amount of carbon fixed in the plants and soil of these abandoned lands when they were naturally regenerating (26 sites) and when they had been reforested with white spruce (23 sites).