Gallery forest
A gallery forest is a forest that stretches like a trellis along the banks of a river in a landscape that is not forested or with another type of forest and stands out from the surrounding area as an independent type of vegetation in aerial photographs.
Gallery forests are often found along rivers in arid areas in which no forest otherwise grows due to the lack of water (gallery forest accompanying the river). The gallery forest is an extrazonal form of vegetation here , it only thrives there because of the special local conditions.
Gallery forest can also form due to more favorable soil conditions on the river bank. An example of this are the plains of the Llanos in Venezuela , where grasses predominate despite high rainfall and only the bank slopes are forested. In the plains, a hard laterite crust in the soil, the arecife , which roots can hardly penetrate , prevents the growth of trees. The continuous crust of the arecife is broken on the bank, so that forest thrives there.
There are also gallery forests along the valleys of Omaruru , Swakop and Kuiseb in central Namib . Here the river beds are filled with a thick layer of sand in which groundwater flows even when there is no rain.
In cultivated land, one speaks of gallery forest, in which case it is forest remains in which the local conditions are anthropogenic . This can be found on bodies of water in pasture and arable land (such as alluvial forest ) as well as on terrain levels ( hillside forest ), i.e. parcels of land that are not suitable for farming. Often it is the small forest as a private economic Wood Reserve, or unnutzbares or inaccessible in the mountains wasteland as a natural residual forest. Characteristically, these are basic boundaries at which the gallery forest also functions as a hedge (such as protection against erosion on watercourses and slopes). In land consolidation as well as through land acquisition and technical Sicherungsbau these functions are eliminated. This makes gallery forests one of the increasingly rare important biotope islands in Central Europe.
literature
- Heinrich Walter, Siegmar-W. Breckle: vegetation and climates. 7th edition. Verlag Eugen Ulmer, Stuttgart 1999, ISBN 3-8252-0014-0 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Gallery forest . ( Spektrum.de [accessed November 30, 2018]).
- ↑ cf. for example the provision “Gallery forest: a fringing forest along flowing waters, lakes and swamps.” Section 5 Definitions Z. 14 of the Salzburg Nature Conservation Act 1999 - NSchG StF: LGBl No. 73/1999 (WV) (idg F. online , ris.bka ).