The evidence for how living elephants affect carbon sequestration is also quite mixed. On the one hand, one paper finds that African forest elephants knock down softwood trees, making way for hardwood trees that sequester more carbon. But on the other hand, many more researchers looking at African savannas have found that elephants knock down lots of trees, converting forests into savannas and reducing carbon sequestration.
Colossal’s website offers links to peer-reviewed research that support their suppositions on the ecological role of woolly mammoths. A key study offers intriguing evidence that keeping large herbivores—reindeer, Yakutian horses, moose, musk ox, European bison, yaks, and cold-adapted sheep—at artificially high levels in
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