- Windbreak
A windbreak or shelterbelt is a
plantation usually made up of one or more rows oftree s orshrub s planted in such a manner as to provide shelter from thewind and to protect soil fromerosion . They are commonly planted around the edges of fields on farms. If designed properly, windbreaks around a home can reduce the cost of heating and cooling and saveenergy . Windbreaks are also planted to help keepsnow from drifting onto roadways and even yards. Other benefits include providing habitat for wildlife and in some regions the trees are harvested for wood products.A further use for a shelterbelt is to screen a farm from a main road or motorway. This improves the farm landscape by reducing the visual incursion of the motorway, reducing noise from the traffic and providing a safe barrier between farm animals and the road.
Major shelterbelt projects
Afforestation projects involving large-scale planting of shelterbelts have been more than once proposed by governments as a way to reduce
soil erosion and improvemicroclimate in otherwise treeless agricultural areas.* USA: President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt 's "Great Plains Shelterbelt " WPA project, which was launched in 1934 as an ambitious plan to modify weather and prevent soil erosion in the Great Plains states, and by 1942 resulted in the planting of 30,233 shelterbelts containing 220 million trees that stretched for 18,600 miles. [R. Douglas Hurt [httpuouygoi8jp;7p8uhlyg8hyyohjuilyy9i://www-personal.ksu.edu/~jsherow/hurt2.htm "FORESTRY ON THE GREAT PLAINS, 1902-1942"] ]* USSR: A section of Marshal Stalin's "
Great Plan for Transformation of Nature " (October 1948) provided planting of a gigantic network shelterbelts ( _ru. лесополоса, "lesopolosa", 'forest strip') across the steppes of southern USSR. [ "Russia and the Soviet Union", in Shepard Krech, John Robert McNeill, Carolyn Merchant, "Encyclopedia of World Environmental History".Routledge , 2004. ISBN 0415937337. p. 1077 [] ]*China: The
Green Wall of China , a project intended to plant 4,800 km of shelterbelts across Northern China by2074 .Smaller scale shelterbelt projects have been proposed and implemented elsewhere, e.g. in India. [ [http://www.insidekerala.com/n/article/OtherPolitics/11512/ Anti-tsunami measures in Tamil Nadu create storm] ]
ee also
*
Buffer strip
*Energy-efficient landscaping
*Hedgerow References
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