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planet — 

In the decades leading up to the first Earth Day, Americans were consuming vast amounts of leaded gas through massive and inefficient automobiles. Industry belched out smoke and sludge with little fear of the consequences from either the law or bad press. Air pollution was commonly accepted as the smell of prosperity. Until this point, mainstream America remained largely oblivious to environmental concerns and how a polluted environment threatens human health.

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New findings show that local food supply for the animals increases when trees are harvested in irregular patches rather than clear-cut squares or rectangles. Known as retention forestry, the practice—which the provincial government is in the process of adopting—creates uneven edges and patches of retained trees that are rich in plant species used by bears.

The acquisition of the approximately 65 acres south of the Friedman Memorial Airport and the proposed cutting of up to 200 trees on that land currently owned by the Eccles family is not the issue.

There are several unanswered questions potentially indicating that this is an underhanded and fairly obvious move to set the stage for future runway extension.

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logging road, laced up his spike-soled caulk boots, put on his red cargo vest and orange hard hat, and stepped into the trees.

He had a job to do: walk a stand of old-growth forest and flag it for clearcutting.

In many ways, this patch of forest was unremarkable. Cronin had spent four decades traipsing through tens of thousands of similar hectares of lush British Columbia rainforest, and had stood under hundreds of giant, ancient trees. Over his career in the Canadian logging industry, he had seen the seemingly inexhaustible resource of big timber continue to dwindle, and the unbroken evergreen that once covered Vancouver Island reduced to rare and isolated groves.

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ALBANY — New York state landowners whose property borders rivers and lakes can apply for

a bag of free seedlings to prevent soil erosion.

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Raised using techniques pioneered in fertility labs, it is the product of new efforts to preserve the seeds of wild plants.

The world is losing plants at an unprecedented rate, with about one in five thought to be at risk of extinction.

"It's an insurance policy against extinction in the wild," says Dr John Dickie of Kew's Millennium Seed Bank at Wakehurst in West Sussex.

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Manheim Township home and dwells on a European beech tree.

The tree brings Ellen Shultzabarger calm. That’s a good thing because she’s responsible for 2.2 million acres of the commonwealth’s state forests.

Shultzabarger has taken over the reins at the Pennsylvania Bureau of Forestry at a time when public and private forests are being buffeted by invasive insects and plants, forest diseases, controversy over natural gas extraction and the effects of climate change.

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thousand tree seedlings stand inside a series of wire enclosures, corralled like farm animals.

Nicholas Fisichelli, forest ecology director at the Schoodic Institute, a nonprofit that functions as a research center for Acadia, walks through the plots of baby trees. They are laid out neatly in a grassy clearing, beside a former infirmary that has been converted into a science building. Lanky and bespectacled, he stoops to peer at the rows of new leaves and delicate stems. One group of plots is a test to see whether seed sown on the ground will sprout in this environment. Other sections are full of seedlings from nursery stock. Collectively, the plots are part of a radical experiment: a wide-ranging search for trees that will be able to survive in this national park decades from now—when things get hotter, drier, and much more uncertain.

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disease.

Surveys around Europe reveal mortality rates from ash dieback as high as 70% in woodlands and 85% in plantations.

A previous study found almost all ash trees could be wiped out.

The disease has swept across Europe over the past 20 years, causing widespread damage to woodlands. In many cases the fungus will eventually kill infected plants.

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suddenly start dying, it’s time to pay attention.

North America’s ancient alpine bristlecone forests are falling victim to a voracious beetle and an Asian fungus. In Texas, a prolonged drought killed more than five million urban shade trees last year and an additional half-billion trees in parks and forests. In the Amazon, two severe droughts have killed billions more.

The common factor has been hotter, drier weather.

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streets. While we are fortunate to have about 2,000 elms left in city limits, we inevitably lose some elms each year to old age and Dutch elm disease. 

Through our Save the Elms Program , volunteers monitor these trees and report any symptoms of Dutch elm disease (DED).  

The arborists at the City of Sacramento then examine all of the trees we report and confirm whether the tree is infected with DED. In some cases, the City Arborists will girdle an infected tree, removing a ring around the tree to prevent the spread of the disease to other nearby elms.

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Khan plans to "aggressively" undertake a massive countrywide campaign to plant 10 billion trees in the next five years to tackle climate change.

Former sports celebrity-turned-politician Khan's Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) has emerged as the largest political party in the July 25 parliamentary elections and it is set to form a coalition federal government later this month.

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coveted for their wood that are protected from logging are chopped down.

Worried about such deforestation, environmental advocates are driving a project to create a DNA database of populations of the bigleaf maple tree on the West Coast. The eventual goal is to use DNA mapping to combat the thriving black markets for timber in tropical countries that are plagued by illegal logging.

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About 39 million acres of tree cover disappeared in 2017 – an area the size of Bangladesh – according to data released Wednesday by the World Resources Institute. That amounts to 40 football fields every minute for a whole year, making it the second-worst year of tree loss on record. The worst was just a year earlier, in 2016.

To gauge the amount of loss, thousands of NASA satellite images from 2001 to 2017 were analyzed through artificial intelligence at the University of Maryland. Then, researchers at the World Resources Institute's Global Forest Watch assessed the changes in tree cover.

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people across the State

It’s 7 am and the sun glares through the frizzy foliage of the 1,000-odd palm trees that stand prettily in a row along the banks of a dry brook. G Kalasamy, clad in a checkered lungi that’s carefully folded and tied above his knees, folds his hands in veneration before one of the trees. A dried flower garland dangles from a nail on the tree’s trunk and the 46-year-old touches the ochre soil thrice before tucking the sickle into the cloth around his waist. He hugs the tree and hops on to it like a toad, clinging on to the trunk with his hands and feet moving in unison. Within seconds, he’s atop the 40-foot tree, camouflaged amidst the thick and thorny palm leaves. He strikes sickle, sending bunches of palm fruit to the ground with a thud.

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Nicole Davi had already taken shooting lessons when she found herself stuck without provisions in the heart of the largest national park in the United States: Alaska’s Wrangell-St. Elias.

As part of a research team sampling ancient trees, the stranding was intentional. Letting their bush pilot fly off with the green duffel bags full of supplies rather than the green duffel bags full of tree slices, however, was not. “We didn’t have food, but we had shotguns,” Davi recalls. “Our mission became to find and core trees… and shoot anything that looked edible.”

The researchers spent three days in the wilderness, extracting foot-and-a-half-long, pencil-thin rods from trees and living on peanuts, grouse and rabbits — an experience that taught Davi that the thrills of fieldwork come at a cost. Ever since then, she says, she’s never traveled without a satellite phone.

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sustenance and shelter for wildlife and a healthy and profitable nut crop for humans. These trees were huge, majestic and very long-lived compared to other species in America’s eastern forests. But tragically, American chestnuts were almost entirely wiped out when an invasive blight fungus was accidentally introduced to the United States in the late 1800s. Without human intervention, populations of pure American chestnut will likely continue to decline until they are all but gone.

However, there are relatives of the American chestnut that evolved with the blight fungus in Asia; they usually tolerate blight infections without much damage. There have been multiple efforts to breed American with Chinese chestnuts to get desirable characteristics from both species, but traditional breeding is a slow and unpredictable process that is limited by undesirable traits from Chinese chestnut that make them less suited to competing in eastern U.S. forests.

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