Of Forests and Fish

As a follow up to yesterday’s post, another excerpt on how marine ecosystems depend on healthy terrestrial ecosystems.  From a NYT op-ed on the importance of trees:

Decades ago, Katsuhiko Matsunaga, a marine chemist at Hokkaido University in Japan, discovered that when tree leaves decompose, they leach acids into the ocean that help fertilize plankton. When plankton thrive, so does the rest of the food chain. In a campaign called Forests Are Lovers of the Sea, fishermen have replanted forests along coasts and rivers to bring back fish and oyster stocks. And they have returned.