what is natural vegetation?
Answers
Answer:
Over the last few thousand years, human societies have come to dominate much of the land area of our planet. We've changed the natural vegetation—sometimes drastically—of many regions. What exactly do we mean by natural vegetation? Natural vegetation is a plant cover that develops with little or no human interference. It is subject to natural forces, storms, or fires that can modify or even destroy it. Natural vegetation can still be seen over vast areas of the wet equatorial climate , although the rainforests there are being slowly cleared. Much of the arctic tundra and the boreal forest of the subarctic zones is in a natural state.
In contrast, there is also human-influenced vegetation. Much of the midlatitude land surface is totally under human control, through intensive agriculture, grazing, or urbanization. Other areas appear to be untouched but may actually be dominated by human activity in a subtle manner. For example, most national parks and national forests have been protected from fire for many decades. As a result, dead branches and debris have accumulated on the forest floor, creating fuel loads that encourage hot, damaging, crown fires rather than cooler, sparser, understory fires that leave the larger, healthier, trees alive.
Humans have also moved plant species from their original habitats to foreign lands and foreign environments. Sometimes exported plants thrive like weeds, forcing out natural species and becoming a major nuisance. Other human activities such as clear-cutting, slash-and-burn agriculture, overgrazing, and woodgathering have had profound effects on the plant species and the productivity of the land.