Iceland's Deserts Are Turning Purple - here's why

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As a southern icelander, i can tell you i have personally seen and lived throught the direct change it had in our area. Absolutely amazing. Way more plants. What this video doesnt tell you is this. There was only rocks, then lupina came, now its grasses and trees. Lupina doesnt like to share space. Once thee is competing it just moves on. Living and dying making dirt in that rock layer that other plants then finally take hold. Thats what my experience had been. I see her as a god send.

Don’t worry. It’s totally not because someone killed a wall of flesh in the underworld, which causes a certain corruption to spread faster

From my experience, while lupine is highly invasive and spreads very easily, it is also quite easy to control. Farmers in eastern europe have been using it as a plant that allows the fields to 'rest' for a year for a while now, they just plow over the field before the seeds are 'ready' and pronto, a rejuvenated field is ready for a new year of crops.

Native lupines helped regrow the land after Mt St. Helens erupted. They're really wonderful flowers. I tossed a few seeds into a bare little traffic island nearby, and now it's green and lovely and the intersection is less dusty.

Worked for Reykjavík to plant trees in the fields of Lupine around the city about 20 years ago mostly in the Heiðmörk area, nothing but forest today so I don´t see a problem as long as you plan to go in and plant trees afterwards, they quickly make way for trees and mostly dissappear. Nothing but good things to say about it

Lupine behaves almost exactly like Scotch Broom here in Canada. People hate it, but it only invades landscapes that are destroyed, it heals those landscapes, and then it does when other plants grow up around it. It is medicine

I live in Sweden and the invasive lupine is spreading like wildfire on the countryside, pushing the native flora to extinction in some areas. it is a great dirt restorer but it must be kept at bay where it is not needed.

You buy lupine seed in just about any garden center in at least the western US. I do love this channel because I’m turning my little plot of Oregon desert into a nature park. 😊👏

I'm from Alaska where it's native, oddly enough I've also lived in Iceland for 4 years. The lupin is seen as a colonizer on degraded/bare soil but is quickly overtaken closely by birch and aspen trees. This can be seen on the edges of roads cut through the landscape. You want to control lupine then plant birch/aspen behind it which will soon outcompete the lupin. You'd be better served by air dropping lupin seeds everywhere, then 5-10 years later airdropping birch and aspen seeds, then in another 5-10 years airdropping various evergreen pine/spruce seeds. BTW blueberry is a understory shrub and it'll do fine.

Lupines aren't greedy... they retreat from competition and ends up in tiny pockets where others things just refuse to grow well. It appears here in recently done flatworks(read as ground disrupting landscaping) and stabilizes the new surfaces before retreating to the presence of other plants. It also appears in the wakes of wildfires in great abundance for a season or two.

Oh, we had a field of lupines near my hometown! It just popped up on the supposedly dead soil after the town dump was leveled to the ground to build some apartments nearby. That was strange, but somehow beautiful. I used to walk there with my friends and sometimes take photos. Just imagine: a few apartment buildings, a sports facility, some department store, an industrial zone... And just in 50 meters from that, right behind the road, lies a purple ocean, separating the city from the forest line.

On the volcanically active areas of the big island of Hawaii, the landscape is covered in lava, and there is initially no life. Ferns starts growing there first, and layers of fern eventually grow on top of the initial layers below, slowly creating soil. Ti plants also spring up. Beautiful process

Lupines also have huge taproots which can help with erosion issues in a topography where trees don't often thrive. Definitely one of the most complicated invasive species debates. But it's Iceland, so it's also one of the friendliest.

As an ecologist who got their degree studying invasive plant species, I have two things I would like to contribute. First, this is perhaps the best video I have seen on YouTube dealing with this issue. It is nuanced, and avoids absolutes, to which this field is prone. Bravo! The second thing is that because the flora is so closely related in this plant's native and invasive ranges, I wonder if contacting researchers in Alaska might give insights into how this species both colonizes similar situations, and then interacts with very similar communities over time. The glacial melting in Alaska, as elsewhere, is exposing new ground to be colonized, and there are likely to be good studies out there which could help you, and Iceland as a whole, assess what might be expected. It would give you a baseline from which to make informed decisions. Good luck, and keep up the good work!

I'm still trying to wrap my head around Iceland having deserts. Never really occurred to me that it could, just like thinking of Antarctica as a desert blows my mind. Hopefully, the lupine and other plants and animals can find a way to coexist. In places where desertification is a problem, viable solutions are needed. Here's hoping the lupine proves to be one of those solutions.

Super interesting subject! At the University of Padova we're currently designing a restoration project in the Venice lagoon that utilizes the introduced Oyster M. gigas as an erosion protection for salt marshes. The problem with the native oyster is that it is completely outcompeted by the introduced one in intertidal habitats (and it also has some other issues which are the cause of its steady decline; the introduced one was brought to Europe BECAUSE of the disappearance of the native one). So if you would try to use the native oyster for such projects it would almost guarantee a failure. So this poses a clear ethical problem: do we accept restoring a habitat through an introduced species, further favoring its spread? On the other hand, the benefices and the ecosystem services provided by the introduced oyster (Higher biodiversity, water filtering, erosion protection, carbon storage etc.) are extremely high, and it has been in Europe for so long now, it is everywhere and is actively farmed, so why should we really care about the fact that it is introduced? It is basically a new native species at this point, so we could use it for its benefices (?). I think its always a case to case question, but the general idea of introduced=bad, native=good does not always make complete sense. One thing is sure though: ACTIVE introduction should be completely avoided as it may lead to really bad unexpected side effects (there is no lack of examples of this...)

One of the most fascinating attributes of Lupin is how it spreads it seed. When the seed pods dry up they twist and split open. The force can throw the seed up to 25 feet when they pop open, allowing the plant to spread itself even further. If you sit quietly in a Lupin field during this time of year you can hear the popping and flying of seeds. You might even get hit by one... ha ha

As a tree planter in British Columbia, we have a lot of lupin here, it is very often the first plant that returns following a forest fire (nicknamed fireflower), it is an incredible plant and plays a huge part of our forests recovery from fires in western Canada. It’ll be interesting to see its effects on the deserts in Iceland

I buy Lupins for my garden here in Canada all the time. Such beautiful flowers and the pollinators love them