The seed dispersal activities of many animals is essential for the Amazon and other forests, because, as Anderson explains: "plants rely on the seed dispersal activities of these animals (i.e. birds, bats, monkeys, tapirs, rodents, and fish) to move seeds away from the mother tree to good sites for germination […] For pioneer species like Cecropia (a genus of tree that we studied), seeds might need light gaps to germinate-that is, seeds might have very specific requirements for germination."
"Contrary to conventional belief, as the climate warms and growing seasons lengthen subalpine forests are likely to soak up less carbon dioxide, according to a new University of Colorado at Boulder study.
As a result, more of the greenhouse gas will be left to concentrate in the atmosphere."
"From the recent discovery of a species of wasp that enslave unsuspecting spiders to a new report from the United Nations that estimates a 500% growth over the next 10 years in computer waste in India alone, a lot has happened this week in green."
"Speed is not a word typically associated with trees; they can take centuries to grow. However, a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has found evidence that forests in the Eastern United States are growing faster than they have in the past 225 years. The study offers a rare look at how an ecosystem is responding to climate change."
"Google.org demonstrated a new platform on Thursday that, if implemented in conjunction with a proposed United Nations program, could provide a significant tool to combat climate change.
Its new "high-performance satellite imagery-processing engine" can process terabytes of information on thousands of Google servers while giving access to the results online.
The platform, which was demonstrated on Thursday at the International Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, would allow anyone using the tool to monitor whether or not trees were being chopped down in a given forest. It analyzes satellite images to show forest changes over a given time period."
"Benedict, who has already been hailed by some in the environmentalist community as a "Green Pope," is the head of the world's only carbon-neutral sovereign state. Last year, he had solar panels installed on the Vatican's rooftops--now a key source of the state's electricity. Then, he donated enough trees to an eco-restoration project in Hungary to nullify the small nation's carbon output. One of the first speeches given by the Green Pope included a call for Catholics to be 'better stewards of God's creation.'"
"If deforestation were happening in your city, how quickly would you work to stop it?" the video asks, pointing out that 90 acres of rainforest are destroyed every minute. Deforestation threatens half of the world's species, and is responsible for 20% of global warming emissions."
"One lesson is that anyone hoping to up-end decades of research pointing to a growing human influence on the climate by challenging a single batch of studies (in this case efforts to chart past temperatures using indirect clues like tree rings) is almost surely on a fool's errand. Another is that scientists, even when under relentless pressure, need to conduct their work scrupulously, carefully and openly and understand that transparency is inevitable in the digital era. A third is that scientists in highly specialized fields would do well to reach out for added statistical expertise when trying to test broader implications of their work."
A lot depends on how 'peat' and 'natural forest' are defined and how rights are agreed upon. Strong lobbies from the forest and tree-crop plantation industry argue that the economy will be harmed if 'business as usual' is interrupted. According to news sources, definitions of 'natural forest' and 'peat' differ between drafts prepared by the Indonesian Government's emissions reduction taskforce and by the Ministry of Forestry. There are several key issues that need to be resolved.
"Forres-based charity Trees for Life will keep the six animals in a 30.4 acre enclosure on its Dundreggan Estate in Glen Moriston, Inverness-shire.
It hopes the boar will control the spread of bracken which shades out other wild plants.
Once a native species, the mammal was hunted to extinction in the UK by the 13th Century. "
"Negotiators at the COP15 conference in Copenhagen didn't see eye to eye on much last month, but almost everyone agreed on one thing: To protect the planet we need to save its forests."
"Mangroves are so efficient at keeping carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere that when they are destroyed, they release as much as 10 percent of all emissions worldwide attributable to deforestation -- even though mangroves account for just 0.7 percent of the tropical forest area, researchers said."