Month: March 2019

Tree of the Month: Treaty Oak

c: Austin Public Library

From Texas A&M’s Famous Trees of Texas:

The tree is the only survivor of a group of live oaks known as the “Council Oaks,” under which Stephen F. Austin, the “father” of Texas, is reputed to have signed the first boundry-line [sic] agreement between the Indians and the whites. An imaginary line running north and south through the heart of this group of oaks divided the territory and remained inviolate for years.

From the podcast Criminal:

The 500-year-old Treaty Oak in Austin, Texas was once called “the most perfect specimen of a North American tree.” But in 1989, Austin’s city forester realized that the Treaty Oak didn’t look so good, and began to wonder whether someone had intentionally tried to kill it.

Black Gums

c: David Swanson

From the Inquirer:

Scientists estimate the age of black gums in an old-growth forest surrounded by Bear Swamp in Cumberland County ranges from 400 to 500 years, making it among the most ancient of trees in the most ancient forest of its kind surviving in the Northeast U.S.

But sea-level rise fueled by warmer oceans and sinking land is pushing saltwater ever closer to the trees, with the potential to kill them in the not-so-distant future.

In the Land of the Giants

David Benjamin Sherry for The New York Times

From the New York Times:

The trees are so big that it would be cowardly not to deal with their bigness head on. They are very, very big. You already knew this — they’re called “giant sequoias” — and I knew it, too. But in person, their bigness still feels unexpected, revelatory. And the delirium of their size is enhanced by their age, by the knowledge that some of the oldest sequoias predate our best tools for processing and communicating phenomena like sequoias, that the trees are older than the English language and most of the world’s major religions — older by centuries, easily, even millenniums. The physical appearance of a tree cannot be deafening, and yet with these trees, it is. Facing down a sequoia, the most grammatically scrambled thoughts wind up feeling right. Really, there’s only so much a person can do or say. Often I found myself expelling a quivering, involuntary Whoa.

Willow – the Flood Defender

c: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

From the Guardian:

Twenty-five miles up the road, by the River Derwent near Keswick, Steven Clark, a sheep farmer, was bracing himself for the worst after Storm Desmond. But while nearby bridges had collapsed and the army had been called in to help 5,500 people flooded out of their homes, Clark’s farm in the village of Braithwaite was fine. The year before he had been persuaded to take part in an experimental project with a paper mill in Workington, which involved planting 28 acres of willow crop. He is convinced it saved his land.

Owned by the Swedish firm Iggesund, which makes premium cardboard packaging for the likes of Toblerone and L’Occitane, the mill had just invested £108m in a biomass plant. They were keen to move away from fossil fuels and needed a sustainable source of wood chips for fuel. Determined to keep their carbon footprint low, the firm looked local. A study had concluded that willow trees would be the best energy crop – they are quick to grow (six inches in a week is not unusual) and don’t have particularly deep roots (a concern for farmers trying to grow other crops nearby) – and Clark was one of the first to sign up.

Wisconsin’s Deer Caught in the Act

From NASA Earth Observatory:

To find out, Clare and colleagues are analyzing data acquired through a citizen science project called Snapshot Wisconsin. So far, more than 1,000 people in Wisconsin have volunteered to set up and monitor more than 1,100 trail cameras; they have collected more than 19 million images. Image classification is performed using crowd-sourcing: people around the world can view the snapshots at a web-based portal and help classify the wildlife in the images.

Singapore’s Super Trees

From CNN:

The man-made mechanical forest consists of 18 supertrees that act as vertical gardens, generating solar power, acting as air venting ducts for nearby conservatories, and collecting rainwater. To generate electricity, 11 of the supertrees are fitted with solar photovoltaic systems that convert sunlight into energy, which provides lighting and aids water technology within the conservatories below.

Church Forests

From Nature:

If you see a forest in Ethiopia, you know there is very likely to be a church in the middle, says Alemayehu Wassie. Wassie, a forest ecologist, has spent the past decade on a mission: preserving, documenting and protecting the unique biodiversity in pockets of forest that surround Ethiopia’s orthodox churches.

Much of the nation’s forestland has been sacrificed to agriculture to feed the country’s mushrooming population — at more than 100 million, it is the world’s 12th largest. Deforestation was particularly encouraged during the country’s period of communism, in 1974–91, when the government nationalized the land, including the large estates of the church, and distributed it to people who converted swathes to farmland. Just 5% of the country is now covered in forest, down from 45% in the early twentieth century.