Month: October 2018

Forest Wisdom I

“Trees, for example, carry the memory of rainfall. In their rings we read ancient weather—storms, sunlight, and temperatures, the growing seasons of centuries. A forest shares a history, which each tree remembers even after it has been felled.”

― Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

Forests in the News: October 2018

Tree of the Month (Halloween Edition): The Devil’s Tree

From Wikipedia:

The Devil’s Tree is a solitary oak tree, with some dead limbs, growing in an undeveloped field on Mountain Road in the Martinsville section of Bernards Township in Somerset County, New Jersey, United States, across from a private housing development. Local legend suggests the tree is cursed: those who damage or disrespect the tree (usually by urinating on it, or making disparaging remarks about it while nearby) will soon thereafter come to some sort of harm, often in the form of a car accident or major breakdown as they leave.

From WeirdNJ.com:

According to some, numerous suicides and murders occurred around the evil arbor.  Supposedly anyone who tries to cut down the tree comes to an untimely end, as it is now cursed.  It is said that the souls of those killed at the spot give the tree an unnatural warmth, and even in the dead of winter no snow will fall around it.

From The Lineup:

Numerous tales surround the tree and its alleged dark power. One of the more prevalent stories concerns a farmer in the early 1900s. At that time, the land upon which the tree stood was used for raising crops. A particularly barren season sent the farmer into a tailspin of depression. In the midst of his despondency, he asked his family to join him for a picnic beneath the tree, and proceeded to bludgeon them to death with an axe. Under the weight of his guilt, the farmer then hung himself from a branch. For hours, his body swayed lifelessly in the breeze.

Rainforest Journalism Fund

Pulitzer Center Launches 5-Year, $5.5 Million Rainforest Journalism Fund

The Pulitzer Center is pleased to announce the launch of the Rainforest Journalism Fund, a five-year, $5.5 million initiative focused on raising public awareness of the urgent environmental issues facing the world’s tropical forests.

…represents a major investment in international environmental and climate reporting, with plans to support nearly 200 original reporting projects along with annual regional conferences…

Forests vs Coal in Germany’s Hambach Woodlands

Backstory from Wikipedia: Hambach surface mine, Hambach forest

NASA Mapping Hurricane Damage to Everglades

From: NASA Earth Observatory

These photos of southeastern Florida reveal swaths of leafless trees, broken branches, and uprooted mangrove trees. The images, which show the Ten Thousand Islands mangrove ecosystem, were acquired on March 28, 2017, and December 1, 2017 by the Goddard Lidar, Hyperspectral and Thermal Imager (G-LiHT).

“It is staggering how much was lost. The question is: which areas will regrow and which areas will not,” said Lola Fatoyinbo, a remote sensing scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “This is an opportunity. With all these data, we can really make a difference in understanding how hurricanes impact Florida’s mangrove ecosystems.”

From Tree to Shining Tree

From Radiolab:

In this story, a dog introduces us to a strange creature that burrows beneath forests, building an underground network where deals are made and lives are saved (and lost) in a complex web of friendships, rivalries, and business relations. It’s a network that scientists are only just beginning to untangle and map, and it’s not only turning our understanding of forests upside down, it’s leading some researchers to rethink what it means to be intelligent. 

The Lost 40

From State of MN DNR:

Lost 40 SNA owes its old-growth pine forest to a surveying error that occurred during the Public Land Survey in 1882. As the story goes, the pines were missed by loggers because surveyors mistakenly mapped the area as Coddington Lake. (The lake is actually located a half-mile to the southeast. Oops.). The site was re-surveyed and the error corrected in 1960. Shortly after, it was incorporated into Big Fork State Forest and its old trees have since endured

From MPR:

This is a place where some of Minnesota’s largest trees tower over some of the state’s most fragile plants, a virgin forest that, legend has it, was spared the ax because surveyors mapped it mistakenly as a wetland.

From Minnesota Fun Facts:

As a result, these towering pines were mapped as a body of water, and the virgin pine in this area was overlooked by the hungry logging companies. After all, what logging company would want to pay for swamp land. This parcel of land became known as “The Lost Forty” and went untouched by loggers. It is now managed by the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources under their Scientific & Natural Areas Program.

Cities out of Wood

From Nautilus:

But Quayside’s newsworthy for another, more encouraging reason: The plan is to build the place, not out of concrete and steel, but wood—and wood is looking good. A recent advance in wood technology should interest the neighborhood’s developers: Teng Li, a University of Maryland mechanical engineer, created with his colleagues wood that’s as “strong as steel, but six times lighter,” he said. Liangbing Hu, Li’s co-author on the study, added, “This kind of wood could be used in cars, airplanes, buildings—any application where steel is used.”

See also, from Science Direct:

The wood from the trees: The use of timber in construction (PDF)
Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews
Volume 68, Part 1, February 2017, Pages 333-359