The presence of trees and plants, that is to say all the existing vegetation, influences the weather. At the local level, vegetation helps to reduce the ambient temperature and generates rainfall and winds already global level, influences helping climate change.
For this reason, the indiscriminate or massive felling today is negatively influencing the climate, favoring the acceleration of climate change. To better understand this problem and this process of influence, in this article of Ecology Verde we analyze How the climate vegetation influences And we will see the great importance of vegetation on our planet.
Vegetation as a regulator of urban climate
To start explaining How the climate vegetation influencesa good starting point to understand it are the urban places and its climate.
In urban areas there is an effect called heat island effectwhich is the generation of heat as a consequence of the large amounts concrete, pavement and other materials that accumulate heat, in addition to that they are places where there are a large number of machines, such as cars and air conditioners, which when operating emanate heat. This effect has a strong impact on the environmental sustainability of a city. Because of this, cities test the abilities of adapting the human being in the face of high temperatures and thus the concepts of smart cities, urban architecture or urban ecology arise, which are already used as indicators of urban sustainability. Urban vegetation (plants and especially trees) provide great benefits to urban environments, causing it to develop a more pleasant life, in addition to its aesthetic and ornamental importance.
First of all, Urban vegetation improves temperature of the air through the control of the radiation of the sun and the environmental humidity, so Vegetation regulates the climate of cities. The trees and plants give stability to urban temperature when rising environmental humidity levels through the evapotranspiration process (removal of water vapor through the leaves). In addition, the leaves cover the passage of the sun, reducing the temperature of these heat islands. In summer times, the asphalt temperature under the shadow that trees give, can be up to 20ºC lower than if there were no shadow and the foliage of the trees causes the air to be between 3ºC and 5ºC cooler.
Besides, Trees are like urban lungs that provide oxygen to the atmosphere and absorb CO2 through the process of photosynthesis. The vegetation also filters and aromatizes the air and has a great ability to reduce pollution. This is filtered by pollution, since they catch dust macroparticles, chemicals and soot. Through photosynthesis, they also remove dangerous pollutants and absorb oil -based elements, preventing water systems from receiving them.
How vegetation influences the climate of urban, rural and natural places
You cannot talk about vegetation as a regulatory of the global climate, but rather at the local level. Besides that Vegetation has cooling effects on local temperaturealso exerts another effect, the weather heating effect.
The presence of vegetation reduces the Albedo, which is the percentage of radiation that a surface reflects with respect to the radiation that affects it, since the darkest colors absorb greater amount of solar radiation and reflect less of this radiation to the exterior. To this we must add that, being rough surface organisms, they absorb more. As a consequence, Vegetation increases local temperature due to increased heat transferred.
On the other hand, having greater vegetation coverage, there is also more evapotranspiration, which favors condensation and generation of local clouds and rains. In addition, more heat is spent on passing the water from the liquid state to the gaseous, which gives rise to a cooling of local temperatures.
Therefore, the effect of vegetation on temperature is ambiguous. There are environments, such as urban, where cooling predominates where vegetable coverage is not so wide and other environments, such as rural and natural environments such as jungles, where there is more vegetation predominates the heating effect more.
Vegetation influences global climate by reducing climate change
Vegetable communities can Help reduce climate changeacting as carbon sinks thanks to their ability to absorb CO2 What do we emit. Thus, good management of agrarian and forest ecosystems can help mitigate climate change by stimulating its sink effect. This includes reducing deforestation and increasing the protection of habitats and forests. However, forests can also become sources of CO2 emission, for example in fires.
Another use of plants is the generation of biofuels that are renewable resources, thus the use of fossil fuels would be avoided. Although this would not be able to withdraw the CO2 from the atmosphere, it would be able to avoid the increase in CO2 emissions. The problem is that other side effects could be generated, such as the increase in prices of other crops or the logging of areas of the forest.
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