Exclosure fences reveal how overbrowsing silently thins forest regeneration
Compare a fenced plot that excludes deer or livestock with the open forest beside it: inside, seedlings and shrubs often explode; outside, the understory can look like a mowed park.
Chronic browsing removes the next canopy generation without dramatic clear-cutting. Managers use exclosures as living experiments that make invisible pressure suddenly obvious.
Sometimes the forest is vanishing from below. A simple fence can prove that herbivores — not only axes — decide whether trees recruit or fail.
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