Davinc.it - Mesozoïc Garden

☘️ — Mesozoïc garden : how to preserve a green biosphere in a hot climate

From 2021

The idea behind this note is to plant particular seeds to refurbish green spaces with heat resistant essences. Throughout plants history and eras. some have descendants who have lived through millions of years until today. Mostly from Mesozoïc Era, we can find numerous heat resistant plant species because climate was way hotter during this period.

A reconstruction of carbon dioxide levels over the past 400 million years or so. Blue areas indicate ice ages. The graph shows that several mass extinction events occurred around the same time as rapid changes in CO2 levels. Source: Foster et al., 2017, with modifications by Paul Olsen.

The Mesozoic Era, which began some 250 million years ago, is usually called the"Age of Reptiles" or the "Age of Cycadophytes".

The Mesozoic is divided into three time periods: the Triassic (245-208 million years ago), the Jurassic (208-146 million years ago), the Cretaceous (146-65 million years ago). The Mesozoic era occurs between the Paleozoic and the Cenozoic.

As you can see on the figure, Mesozoïc Era was also way above the current era in terms of CO2 concentrations — more than 1000 ppm then (part per million) — for an average of 419.3 ppm in 2023 (see here).

This means that plants from this period managed to thrive through a very high density of CO2. They were the following (from this source) :

Seeds like Glossopteris, ferns and early species of gymnosperms (seed plants, such as the evergreens) dominated the Triassic terrain.
Conifers were the dominant land plants of the Jurassic.
Cycades and Ginkgos are also common in this period, now found throughout the world even today but prefer to thrive in areas that have tropical or subtropical climates.
Specific plant species like Equisettes, Osmunda, William Sonia, Pachypteris, Sequoia, Araucaria, Aralopsoid

The idea I propose in this note is to use these various Mesozoïc seeds and plant them abundantly to ensure a green-staying biosphere even with the augmentation of CO2 levels in the atmosphere due to Climate Change.

➠ Going further

In Australia, some plant essences even germinate during forest fire to ensure a safe growth in the fresh burned soil after the fire. For example, you can read about Banksia here (Frontiers in Plant Science). Several other plants, including grasstrees (Xanthorrhoea) and some species of orchids only flower after fire.

Also, such techniques might be used too.

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