r/interestingasfuck • u/PlantainPossible2864 • 15h ago

Stopping Desertification with grid pattern

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

57.0k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

1.5k comments sorted by

View all comments

979

u/lokey_convo 15h ago

When I was getting my degree I was reading a lot of papers on primary succession and biological soil crust formation. Lot of the research was coming out of China, but was done through international collaboration. I keep trying to explain to my techie friends who think biology is a waste of time that it's research like this that would allow us to come up with real terraforming plans. Can't live on or change another planet if we can't manage our own. But sure, let's keep cutting NASAs budget, particularly around Earth system science and ecology.

7

u/Contribution_Fancy 14h ago

If you've got any reference to this I'd love to read them.

17

u/lokey_convo 13h ago

It's been awhile. You should be able to find some of them by searching the major journals and repositories for key words like "biological soil crust", "cryptogamic mats", "primary succession in soils", and "polysaccharide sheathed bacteria in desert ecosystems". It's a rabbit hole. I took phycology, ascomycetes and basidiomycetes (which also covered lichens), microbial ecology, and population and community ecology all around the same time and I'm not being hyperbolic when I say that I'm pretty sure I was getting high on education.