For a plant, life in Argentina’s Monte Desert is hard enough. Daily temperatures can fluctuate dramatically; it rarely rains, and there are few nutrients in the parched soil for a hungry plant. To add to their struggles: Across this desert, a long history of oil drilling and a new boom in fracking have left hundreds of sites where plants have been completely wiped out, and the soil replaced with trucked-in, densely compacted dirt. When those drilling sites go quiet, plants often struggle to recolonize the places they once lived. In a 2024 study, researchers from the National University of Comahue examined whether a technique required by the local government to aid restoration helps plants regrow at these former drilling sites. They found that the technique, a type of assisted natural regeneration (ANR), is a bit of a mixed bag: The restored sites still had much lower plant density, diversity and plant coverage when compared with undisturbed sites. However, about 40% of the species that might be found in an undisturbed site were present in the ANR-remediated sites, including some species the researchers didn’t expect. “We were surprised,” says primary investigator Florencia del Mar González, a researcher at Comahue’s Laboratory of Rehabilitation and Ecological Restoration of Arid and Semiarid Ecosystems (LARREA). When looking at satellite images before their fieldwork, del Mar González and her team saw little regrowth at the former drilling sites. However, when they went into the field, “we began to find some response from the ecosystem in some…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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