> There used to be about 4 million American chestnut trees in eastern U.S. forests, until chestnut blight (Cryphonectria parasitica) arrived […]
The number is closer to 4 billion with a B[1]
Their range was across
eastern North America and I’ve read estimates that they may have been a quarter to a third of the trees in those forests before the blight arrived.
It also makes me wonder. There was an estimated 30-60 million buffalo before colonialism in the Americas. However, those numbers were probably only possible to reach because of human activity driving out other apex predators and becoming themselves the apex predator. Similar story with paw-paws. Though they're not necessarily being threatened by anything currently, their range is decreasing. It turns out humans were essential for its distribution (likely due to other megafauna going extinct). Another example that comes to mind is the "prairie turnip" which as a staple food of many peoples that lived in the grasslands. Despite harvesting being a destructive process, the action actually ended up helping to spread their seeds. Without human harvest we've again seen a decrease in their range. I can also go on about how essential California cultural burns are for most of the "native" ecology, but I'm sure you get the point
Anyways I guess what I'm getting at is: I wonder how much humans played a role in it achieving such a widespread distribution.
There was a recent book called Dark Emu about aboriginal Australian's role in the native landscapes. Early colonists often remarked that the place looked like a giant, well-managed park. Well it turns out they actually did play a huge role in purposeful management of it. They even grew grains in massive monocultural fields that were often even larger than modern agricultural plots. Similarly there's been a ton of recent research into Amazonia and looking at it as a "manufactured landscape" because of how important the purposeful management of it by native peoples was to the ecosystem as a whole
Horses (which competed with buffalo) and saber tooth tigers (which predates buffalo) are two examples that immediately come to mind of megafauna that went extinct around the time humans arrived. Though it's still debated how much that had to do with humans overhunting vs the shift from a glacial to an interglacial climate
> There used to be about 4 million American chestnut trees in eastern U.S. forests, until chestnut blight (Cryphonectria parasitica) arrived […]
The number is closer to 4 billion with a B[1]
Their range was across eastern North America and I’ve read estimates that they may have been a quarter to a third of the trees in those forests before the blight arrived.
1 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_chestnut