Raining bats and logs

"How to replant a rainforest cheaply

SINCE the dawn of agriculture, man's most enduring relationship with forests has been to cut them down, thus taking timber and liberating land in one fell swoop. But not all cleared forest is suitable for farming—and that is particularly so when the forest in question is in the tropics. Daniel Nepstad, a forest ecologist at the Woods Hole Research Centre in Falmouth, Massachusetts, estimates that about a third of cleared tropical rainforest is quickly abandoned, having been left in a condition from which it would take decades to recover if nature were to take its course unaided. Such land is, literally, of no use to man or beast. Indeed, it is worse, for natural forest promotes cloud formation and local rainfall, and thus helps nearby farmers. The clouds themselves may even keep the Earth cooler than it would otherwise be. Cleared land, by contrast, promotes drought. Replanting it with trees by hand, however, would be ridiculously expensive."

Source: The Economist

A very interesting article about how you can use the service of bats to spread seeds in order to replant the rainforest.