Month: April 2019

“It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men’s hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of air that emanation from old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit.”

Robert Louis Stevenson   

Southwestern China Forest Fire Contained After Killing Over Two Dozen Firefighters (NPR)

US – China Soy Tariff Way Could Destroy 13 Million Hectares of Amazon Rainforest (The Guardian)

Damning Logging Report Finds Victorian Department Neither Effective Nor Respected (The Guardian)

Amazon’s Trees Get a Taste of Air of the Future (The Guardian)

A Respite From Record Losses, but Tropical Forests Are Still in Trouble (The New York Times)

Death By A Thousand Cuts – Vast Expanse of Rainforest Lost in 2018 (The Guardian)

 

 

From Wikipedia:

The Burke and Wills Dig Tree on the banks of Cooper’s Creek is associated with explorers Robert O’Hara Burke and William John Wills. The tree was blazed on 21 April 1861 by William Brahe and party who had remained at Cooper’s Creek while Burke, Wills, Charles Gray and John King forged ahead to the northern coast of Australia. Brahe’s party was finally forced to abandon the depot and trek homewards, leaving a message pointing to a cache of hidden stores.

Brahe noted in his journal that the party left the depot at 10 o’clock a.m., leaving 50 pounds (23 kg) of flour, 50 pounds (23 kg) of oatmeal, 50 pounds (23 kg) of sugar, and 30 pounds (14 kg) of rice buried near the stockade, at the foot of a large tree, and marked the word “Dig” on the tree.

These search parties helped open up vast areas of inland Australia for settlement, as a result of the increased knowledge of the country they brought back with them…By the time the public funeral for Burke and Wills was held in January 1863, pastoralists were driving their sheep and cattle up the Bulloo. Within a decade or so there were established homesteads on the banks of Cooper’s Creek…

Listen to the Futility Closet podcast on the Dig Tree:

From The Conversation:

Countries with high levels of human well-being are more likely to show increasing forest growth. That’s the finding of a new study by a group of Finnish scientists, published in PLOS ONE. Their work shows that countries exhibiting annual increases in the amount of trees typically score highly on the UN’s Human Development Index (HDI), a scoring system that uses measures of life expectancy, education, and income to assess development status. Meanwhile, countries with a net annual forest loss typically score lower on the HDI.

From NASA Earth Observatory:

The Appalachians appear brown because cooler temperatures at higher elevations cause a lag in the greening. The trees at the higher elevations were likely still in bloom and had not started to produce leaves. The speckles of tan and yellow throughout the coastal plain and the Mississippi River Valley are farmland; fields often stay bare or filled with dry crop stubble until late spring planting.

From Wikipedia:

Crown shyness (also canopy disengagement, canopy shyness, or intercrown spacing) is a phenomenon observed in some tree species, in which the crowns of fully stocked trees do not touch each other, forming a canopy with channel-like gaps. The phenomenon is most prevalent among trees of the same species, but also occurs between trees of different species. There exist many hypotheses as to why crown shyness is an adaptive behavior, and research suggests that it might inhibit spread of leaf-eating insect larvae.

From Katie Holten:

From The Daily Overview:

From Pacific Standard:

Stands like this, and Lake’s huckleberry hillside across the river, mark the beginnings of a return to traditional Karuk forest stewardship that encourages the growth of traditional Native foods including tanoak acorns, camas bulbs, and more. Although they sometimes intentionally planted tobacco and other medicinals, the Karuks focused on using fire at the right time for the right reasons for their essential forest products, Tripp says. Huckleberry and acorn production surges when fire removes the shrubs competing with berry bushes, and encourages tanoaks over pines.

From ABC News:

Melbourne gave 70,000 trees email addresses so people could report on their condition. But instead people are writing love letters, existential queries and sometimes just bad puns.

Previously from the Atlantic.