Hungry Wild Pigs Are Worsening Climate Change
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Scientists already knew, to some extent, that this releases the carbon that’s locked in the soil, but researchers in Australia, New Zealand, and the US have now calculated how much soil wild pigs may be disturbing worldwide. The researchers then pulled in estimates done in Switzerland and China of the carbon emissions created by wild pigs rooting around there.This patchwork creates inherent uncertainties. The amount of carbon loss also depends on the microbiome of the soil—the bacteria and fungi that feed on that plant material.Given this wide range of variables, the researchers simulated 10,000 maps of potential global wild pig densities, excluding the animal’s native ranges across parts of Europe and Asia. (In other words, they only modeled the places where the pigs are an invasive species.) For each of these simulations, they randomly assigned values of pig-induced soil carbon emissions based on data from those previous studies. Invasive menaces like wild pigs are tearing through carbon-rich soil outside their historical habitats.
As said here by Wired