Group items tagged

The leading international organizations working to protect and manage the world's forests are calling for governments across the globe to increase communities' role in forest management. Doing so could contribute to lifting close to a billion people out of poverty, as well as improve the health and vitality of forests.

Forest Service Southern Research Station (SRS) scientists recently used long-term data from the Coweeta Hydrological Laboratory (Coweeta) in Western North Carolina to examine the feasibility of managing forests for water supply under the changing weather conditions forecast for the future.

A new research paper written by Simon Fraser University biologists and published in the journal Science concludes that the abundance of salmon in spawning streams determines the diversity and productivity of plants in surrounding forests.

Fires, felling and agriculture are whittling Europe's forests down into isolated patches, threatening to speed up desertification and deplete wildlife, a UN report warned Tuesday.

The largest continuous expanse of forest in the world, found in the country's cold northern regions - is undergoing an accelerating large-scale shift in vegetation types as a result of globally and regionally warming climate. That in turn is creating an even warmer climate in the region, according to a new study published in the journal Global Change Biology and highlighted in the April issue of Nature Climate Change.

A new study has revealed widespread reductions in the greenness of Amazon forests caused by the last year's record-breaking drought.

The world's established forests remove 2.4 billion tonnes of carbon per year from the atmosphere - equivalent to one third of current annual fossil fuel emissions - according to new research published in the journal Science.

Thousands of hectares of tropical dry forests in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais are now safe from logging, thanks to scientists affiliated with a project called Tropi-Dry.

Investing $40 billion annually in the forest sector is needed for the world to transition into a low carbon, resource-efficient green economy, according to a UN report released here Sunday.

Indonesia has the potential to realize major reductions in national greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation, and simultaneously earn significant new income for national and regional governments, if policies to Reduce Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+) are developed with strong and specific economic incentives, said scientists in a new paper published in the leading scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Those making land use decisions to reduce the harmful effects of climate change have focused almost exclusively on greenhouse gases - analyzing, for example, how much carbon dioxide is released when a forest is cleared to grow crops. A new study in Nature Climate Change aims to present a more complete picture - to incorporate other characteristics of ecosystems that also influence climate.

global warming may affect the capacity of trees to store carbon by altering forest nitrogen cycling, concludes a study led by Jerry Melillo, Distinguished Scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) Ecosystems Center, and published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The demise of the world's forests some 250 million years ago likely was accelerated by aggressive tree-killing fungi triggered by global climate change, according to a new study by a University of California, Berkeley, scientist and her Dutch and British colleagues.

The ability of forests, plants and soil to suck carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air has been under-estimated, according to a study on Wednesday that challenges a benchmark for calculating the greenhouse-gas problem.

Eutrophication harms the environment in many ways. Unexpectedly, nitrogen fertilizer may also be positive for the environment. And even acidic soils, promoting the destruction of forests, can have a positive effect. Researchers from the Biogeochemistry Department at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz found out that nitrogen fertilizer indirectly strengthens the self-cleaning capacity of the atmosphere. Their study shows that nitrous acid is formed in fertilized soil and released to the atmosphere, whereby the amount increases with increasing soil acidity. In the air, nitrous acid leads to the formation of hydroxyl radicals oxidizing pollutants that then can be washed out. Previously, this nitrogen-effect has not been taken into account by geoscientists. The gap has now been closed by the Max Planck researchers.

Deforestation in the rainforests of West Africa reduces rainfall over the rest of the forest, according to new University of Leeds research published in Geophysical Research Letters.

Ellen Silbergeld keeps the price of gold posted on the door to her office at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore. The price is now at a record high (better than $1,500 an ounce) and Silbergeld, professor at Hopkins and editor-in-chief of the journal Environmental Research knows that is really bad news for the Amazon.

The gamitana fish, a close relative of the flesh-eating piranha, mostly eats fruit and can carry seeds down the Amazon River as far as 3 miles (5 kilometers), reports a new Cornell study, making it one of the longest seed dispersals ever reported. The researchers report that these fish (Colossoma macropomum, known as gamitana in Peru, and tambaqui in Brazil) may play an important role in the structure of the Amazon forest as fruit seeds remain viable in their gut for many days and are widely spread.