Bad news: Trees emit methane, a greenhouse gas. Good news: Some are home to bacteria that can’t get enough of it.

MANY OF TODAY’S geoscientists are carbon voyeurs. Knowing that human disregard for the carbon cycle has screwed the climate, they have kept a close eye on carbon’s hottest variants—carbon dioxide (CO₂) and methane. Both gasses trap heat on the planet through the greenhouse effect, and over a span of 100 years, methane is 28 times more potent than CO₂. Rigorously accounting for greenhouse gas flow is step one of building models that predict the future climate.

Some line items in the methane budget, such as pipeline leaks and cow farts, are well understood. But others are hazier. “There’s lots of gaps and uncertainties, particularly in wetlands, and inland waters,” says Luke Jeffrey, a biogeochemistry postdoc at Southern Cross University in Australia. By one 2020 tally from the Global Carbon Project, wetlands emit about 20 to 31 percent of Earth’s annual methane release—more than the amount from fossil fuel production.

But in the past decade, researchers have zeroed in on a perhaps counterintuitive source of greenhouse gas emissions: trees. Freshwater wetland trees, in particular. Trees bathing in wet or flooded soil absorb methane and then leak it through their bark. In a 2017 study, ecologist Sunitha Pangala, then at the Open University in the United Kingdom, found that trees in the Amazon were responsible for 200 times more methane than trees in other wetland forests, accounting for 44 to 65 percent of the region’s total emissions.

Does this mean trees are bad for the planet? Of course not. Trees suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. And in a study published April 9 in Nature Communications, Jeffrey and his team report how trees can also be methane sinks, sheltering microbes that convert it to the less damaging CO_2. His team discovered methanotrophs, or methane-eating microbes, in a species of trees called paperbarks, which grow in eastern Australian swamps. The microbes gobble up methane, reducing the trees’ potential emissions by about a third. The finding brings more clarity to how trees factor into the elusive methane budget that experts say is vital for climate predictions.

“This is an important contribution and one that’s timely,” says Patrick Megonigal, a biogeochemist with the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center who is not affiliated with the study. Megonigal has researched the release of methane from trees for over a decade, and is an expert in the flows of greenhouse gases throughout wetland and upland forests.

“When I saw this paper, I just said, ‘Holy shit, this is really interesting,’” says Jeffrey White, a professor emeritus at the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University. White, who was not involved in the study, has studied methane cycling for over 30 years and says it elegantly addressed a hunch that researchers have had—but haven’t been able to nail down—that methanotroph activity occurs in tree bark. He calls the work “profoundly important.”

Methanotrophs are everywhere and have been for as long as atmospheric oxygen has existed on Earth, so White is confident this isn’t an isolated case: He’s noticed similar behavior in Minnesota birch trees.

Wetlands contribute more methane to the atmosphere than any other natural source. But without methanotrophs, they’d release an estimated 50 to 90 percent more. These microbes turn methane into carbon dioxide similar to the way combustion does. The process is, almost literally, a slow burn. But it prevents a majority of wetland methane from reaching the sky, making soil a source and a sink. Far less is known about the methane feasts taking place inside trees.

Jeffrey wanted more clarity. A few years ago, his attention turned to the paperbarks. “It’s such a unique tree with amazing layers of bark,” Jeffrey says. These layers are moist, dark, and known to contain methane. (Jeffrey sometimes refers to it as “treethane.”) “We just thought it could be an ideal spot for methanotrophs,” he continues. So he set out to prove that the gas-eating microbes were hiding there. Jeffrey designed a series of experiments that would cater to their appetites. First, he sliced bark from trees in three wetland sites and sealed those strips inside glass bottles containing methane. Then, he waited. Over a week, he measured as the methane levels in the bottles dropped. In some samples, more than half of it vanished. In control bottles that contained either sterilized bark or nothing at all, methane levels remained paper-flat.

Jeffrey’s team also knew that methanotrophs have picky palates. Methane’s one carbon atom can exist as either of two stable isotopes: the classic carbon-12 or the heavier carbon-13 that lugs around an extra neutron. Carbon-13’s bonds are harder to break, so methanotrophs would rather snack on the lighter isotope. Jeffrey’s team found that the relative levels of carbon-13-methane in the bottles increased with time. Something in the bark was alive and selectively eating, like a kid leaving the yellow Starbursts in the bag after picking out the pinks.

Encouraged by these traces of activity, they sent bark across town to the microbiologists at Monash University, who ran a microbial analysis of all of the species that were living in the bark. The verdict: Paperbark samples contained a bustling unique population of bacteria not found in the surrounding soil or swamp, most of which fall into the methane-hungry genus Methylomonas.

But all of those results arose in a lab, and Jeffrey’s team needed to see how real, live trees behave, specifically how fast they leak methane. They waded through a wetland forest in New South Wales, gently attached sealed chambers and spectrometers to the sides of paperbarks, and measured how much the trees emitted per second.

Then Jeffrey injected a gas called difluoromethane into the chamber. Difluoromethane is a sneaky treat for methanotrophs—it temporarily inhibits their appetite. “It actually stops them consuming methane,” Jeffrey says. After letting the gas diffuse in for an hour, Jeffrey flushed it and reexamined the emissions. Because the microbes stopped eating, methane levels jumped. On average, the team calculated, microbes had been removing 36 percent of the methane that would otherwise seep into the atmosphere.

Most of that methane actually originates in the wet soil, Jeffrey says. Microbes digest organic matter in the dirt and release methane. Some burbles out of the soil or water, but some flows up through tree roots like they’re straws, or soaks into the bark then diffuses out through the wood. (Different microbes can also make their own methane within the tree, but Jeffrey has published evidence that isotope signatures of the methane in bark matches that in the soil.) Thanks to the tree-dwelling microbes, less of it gets released into the atmosphere as methane, because they transform it into less harmful CO₂. “This methane in soil is possibly going to come up anyway from a wetland. If they’re coming up through trees, they have to get through this gauntlet of bacteria,” says Jeffrey. “So this new discovery—I’m kind of looking at trees now as almost like methane filters.”

“It’s really exciting for me, because this has been a question that I’ve been interested in for a long time,” says Mary Jane Carmichael, a microbial ecologist at Hollins University in Virginia not involved in the study. Carmichael reported in a 2017 study that dead trees emit methane, too. (Similarly, in a previous study, Jeffrey showed that dead trees emitted eight times the methane of living ones.) “I’m never really surprised by what microorganisms are capable of,” Carmichael says. “We probably will see that it’s a pretty widespread phenomenon.”

Understanding how trees add and subtract methane from the environment will help scientists adjust a sort of planet-wide carbon calculus. While satellite data helps track emissions from above, finer details for each source and sink are essential to really make predictions, says Marielle Saunois, an environmental scientist with the University of Versailles Saint Quentin who coordinates the Global Methane Budget. But this study won’t change climate models right away. “The processes are important but very local,” she says. It’s hard to scale up bark microbe effects to a global or even regional perspective. And while this work helps predict how wetland emissions change with climate, global models don’t yet include these feedback effects. “Ideally,” she says, “it should.”

“Vegetation and plant-based pathways in methane emissions are actually a really under-studied component of the global methane budget,” agrees Carmichael.

Earth’s climate behavior is rife with feedback loops: For example, temperature, moisture, and CO₂ affect how tree species are distributed, which affects methane emissions, which affects climate, and so on. Knowing that these microbes exist—and future studies that can pinpoint where else they exist—will improve climate predictions by making methane models more robust.

“This is good news,” says Megonigal. In wetland forests that are rich in methane, the microbes buffer emissions. In drier upland forests that produce less methane, he says, “they might actually be removing methane from the atmosphere on our behalf.”

Jeffrey next plans to examine how the trees’ filtering of the greenhouse gas changes with the seasons. Since he published the study, people have pitched him a variety of ideas for how to harness forest methanotrophs for climate action. Could scientists inoculate other tree species with the microbes to establish methane-gobbling forests? Could we culture them in sawdust and spray them on forest floors? Could we feed them to cows? “I have no idea, to be honest,” Jeffrey says. “And my personal preference is not to tinker with nature too much.”

And, he points out, human help might not even be needed to spread methanotrophs around: “I’m assuming—and hoping—that we’ll probably find these guys living elsewhere, in other trees, too.”

You are walking slowly through a forest with birds gently chirping around you. The wind glides through the trees, and you bend down to scoop up some earth, noticing the aroma.

Relaxed yet?

That sensory experience is an example of a forest bath, a practice that has been shown in about 20 studies to improve mental and physical health, and it has become a prescribed treatment for stress-related conditions in Japan, according to Kirsten McEwan, an associate professor, and research psychologist at the University of Derby in the United Kingdom.

Spending any time in nature is a great way to improve your mental health, and the ideal amount of time is about 120 minutes a week, said health and environmental psychologist Mathew White, a senior scientist at the University of Vienna. That may sound like a lot, but you don’t have to do it all at once.

“Just having those micro-moments of life in nature, whether it is just 5 or 10 minutes a day building up to that 120 minutes, it all has massive benefit,” McEwan said.

Forest bathing can add even more to your well-being – and though it may sound a little inaccessible, experts say everyone can incorporate it into their lives.

How to do it

In fact, forest bathing doesn’t have to take place in a forest.

“Forest bathing is essentially a slow, mindful walk in nature where you pay really close attention to your surroundings, using all of your senses,” McEwan said. “It’s just to kind of switch your brain off and give yourself a little bit of a rest from ruminating about your to-do list.”

But you don’t have to walk all that much to reap the benefits if you are appreciating your surroundings. And consider this: Nature isn’t just waiting for you on your next beach or camping trip.

“Nature is oftentimes under our nose if we just take the time to be intentional about connecting with it,” said Chloe Carmichael, a New York therapist. Even those who live in areas surrounded by natural beauty can start to tune it out, so intentional focus is key, she said.

Whether you live in a bustling city or an expansive rural area, Carmichael and McEwan said, everyone can benefit from time in nature – and the best way to build time outdoors into your routine is to incorporate it into what you already do.

On your commute

Walking is great for a forest bath, even if it’s on your way to work or school.

Maybe you leave a little earlier and go more slowly, taking a route with more greenery, McEwan said. Perhaps you pay closer attention to the flowers springing through the cracks in the cement or the trees lining the street, she added.

“It’s like nature reclaiming the city,” McEwan said.

During a meal

If you consider yourself a home chef and regularly cook dinner for yourself and loved ones, maybe it’s time to grow herbs in your kitchen, said Carmichael, who is also author of “Nervous Energy: Harness the Power of Your Anxiety.”

It’s an easy way to bring something natural and fragrant into your routine without requiring too much work, she added.

And once dinner is ready, consider moving the meal outside in mild weather.

If you can put some focus into the environment and observe the world going on around you, having a meal in your yard or on a patio is a great way to get your minutes in nature, McEwan said.

In your office

Getting your forest bath in the office can be good for both you and your work, Carmichael said.

That could mean going on a weekly lunch walk with a work friend, or taking a break to look out the window or even bringing a plant into your office, she added.

If you have meetings in small groups, you could suggest taking the meeting while walking or sitting outside, McEwan said.

“We are more relaxed and creative when we are outside anyway,” she said.

When you can’t get moving

Mobility isn’t always accessible to everyone, and while moving outside is optimal, there are other ways to get the benefits, McEwan said.

Videos online can take you through photos and videos of the natural world, with narration guiding your attention, she said.

An essential oil diffuser can also help if loaded with pine or evergreen scents, since much of the benefit of forest bathing comes from breathing in the organic compounds trees emit, McEwan said.

Above all, be comfortable

However you choose to forest bathe and get your time in nature, the most important thing is to find something that works for you, McEwan said.

Find a guiding audio that makes you feel good and isn’t too prescriptive in how you interact with your natural world, she suggested. And if hugging a tree or smelling the dirt feels unnatural and cringey to you, find a different way.

“To get the maximum benefits of spending time in nature, you have to be comfortable,” she said.

By Katlin Dewitt, VDOF Forest Health Specialist

The southern pine beetle (SPB) is the most destructive native insect that threatens pine forests in the Southeast. These tiny insects, about the size of a grain of rice as adults, are especially harmful due to the complex system of pheromones (insect “scents” that are specific to a species) they utilize to find host trees and aggregate. Pheromones allow populations to build up quickly within a pine stand, often leading to classic beetle spots comprised of dead and dying trees.

Aerial view of a classic SPB spot

The VDOF forest health program monitors SPB populations with traps each spring, starting at the time the redbuds bloom. Traps are placed in high-risk locations (areas with a significant volume of pine) and are baited with pheromones. These traps are checked weekly for four weeks and samples are sorted, looking at the number of SPB and their associated predator, a clerid beetle. The relative number of these two insects is used to determine if southern pine beetle populations are increasing or decreasing. This information allows foresters and landowners to be more alert and act quickly should they see SPB.

SPB trap and sample

In addition to monitoring, certain silvicultural practices can reduce the risk of southern pine beetle attack in a pine stand. Pre-commercial thinning is the most effective management strategy to prevent SPB damage. How can forestry practices influence the population of tiny beetles? A lot of it goes back to those tiny clouds of pheromones the beetles rely on to communicate. When stands are overstocked and densely packed, these “scents” can become concentrated and highly aromatic to the beetles, drawing more and more in, thereby creating an SPB spot. A thinned stand allows more air movement, which breaks up the clouds of beetle perfume and makes beetle aggregation more difficult. Thinning also increases the health of the stand, and healthier trees are better able to resist beetle infestation.

Pine stand thinned using Pine Bark Beetle Program cost-share funds

VDOF has a Pine Bark Beetle Prevention Program which is funded by the US Forest Service Southern Pine Beetle Prevention and Restoration Program. VDOF uses this money to operate a cost-share program available to landowners and loggers for specific forest management practices that improve the health of managed pine stands and reduce the risk of SPB infestation. The three cost-share programs offered are:

• Pre-commercial thinning: Assistance through this program will cover 60% of direct project costs of pre-commercial thinning on parcels greater than 5 acres, with trees no older than 15 years, and tree density before thinning greater than or equal to 800 stems per acre. Cost-share payments cannot exceed $105/acre and $10,000 per federal fiscal year.
• Longleaf restoration: Longleaf pine is a native pine species that has been historically diminished in Virginia and is somewhat resistant to attack from SPB. To aid in restoring these stands, this program pays 60% of total direct costs associated with site preparation, planting, or post-planting treatments within the first five years of plantation establishment. Cost-share payment cannot exceed $225/acre and $10,000 per federal fiscal year.
• Logger incentive program: This program reimburses certified SHARP loggers in Virginia who conduct first commercial thinning on smaller stands, 5-25 acres in size, with trees 12-22 years of age. Assistance covers 50% of itemized logging costs, not to exceed $2,000/parcel, and no more than 5 applications (or $10,000) per federal fiscal year.

To learn more about how you can protect your forest from the southern pine beetle, check out the prevention program information, or reach out to your local area forestry staff.

Virginia’s state forests, State parks, wildlife management areas, and natural area preserves are state lands with distinct purposes. These state-owned and managed lands also differ from federally-owned national forests and national parks. It may be helpful to review these differences before visiting one of these areas.

State Forests

• Managed by the Virginia Department of Forestry.
• Managed for multiple resources, including wood products, wildlife, water quality, and passive recreation.
• Some forests allow hunting and fishing. Regulations for these activities are governed by the Department of Wildlife Resources (DWR) and require the proper licenses.
• Often have passive or self-guided recreational opportunities (e.g., hiking, mountain biking, horseback riding).
• Require a State Forest Use Permit for some activities.
• Typically are not staffed daily and do not have offices and restroom facilities.
• Do not have camping facilities or allow camping.
• Do not allow recreational ATV use.
• May have certain areas designated as natural areas.
• Not funded by the Commonwealth’s General Fund.

State Parks

• Managed by the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation.
• Focused primarily on preservation and protection of natural systems, with minimal manipulation or management.
• Tell the story of Virginia and the broader American experience through unique features, such as geological formations, rare plants, fascinating animals, diverse forest and aquatic communities, archeological sites, Colonial homes, Civil War battlefields, pioneer homesteads, and more.
• Generally, do not allow hunting and sometimes allow fishing.
• Offer a wide variety of recreational opportunities, both passive and structured.
• Some have meeting facilities, festivals, concerts, and other events.
• Typically staffed daily with an entry area, offices, and restroom facilities.
• Often have rental cabins or lodges, camping facilities, pools or beaches for swimming, and picnic shelters.
• Typically require daily access tickets, annual passes, and/or reservations for facility rentals.
• Are funded by the Commonwealth’s General Fund.

Wildlife Management Areas

• Managed by the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources.
• Solely intended to preserve and improve wildlife habitats with a particular focus on game animals.
• Provide public space for hunting and fishing activities.
• Receive some funding from the Pittman-Robertson Federal Aid to Wildlife Restoration Act.
• Land acquisition and maintenance fees are largely provided by hunters and anglers through license fees and taxes levied on gear.
• Generally, prohibit swimming, mountain biking, ATV use, and organized sports.
• Typically are not staffed daily and have limited offices and restroom facilities.
• Not funded by the Commonwealth’s General Fund.

Natural Area Preserves

• Managed by the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation – Division of Natural Heritage.
• Focused on protecting threatened or rare plants, animals, and natural communities.
• Many allow low-impact visitation, such as hiking and birdwatching.
• Generally, do not allow impactful activities such as camping, hunting, fishing, timber harvesting, vegetation harvesting, and motorized trail vehicles.
• Typically are not staffed daily and do not have offices and restroom facilities.
• Some are open to the public only through arrangements made through a land steward.
• Some are state-owned while others are privately held with a DCR-DNH easement on the property.
• May be temporarily closed or access restricted to protect sensitive or rare plant and animal species.
• Receive some General Funds.

National Forests

• Federal lands managed by the USDA Forest Service.
• Sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of the nation’s forests and grasslands to meet the needs of present and future generations.

National Parks

• Federal lands managed by the U.S. Department of the Interior National Park Service.
• Preserves the natural and cultural resources and values of the National Park System for the enjoyment, education, and inspiration of this and future generations.

Coast redwoods are amazing trees that scientists have studied for generations. We know they are the tallest living trees and have survived for millennia, resisting fire and pests. Because redwoods are long-lived, large and decay-resistant, the forests they dominate store more above-ground mass, and thus presumably more carbon, than any other ecosystem on Earth.

Nonetheless, while working on a recently published study, colleagues at the University of California, Davis, and Cal Poly Humboldt and I learned a secret that had been sitting right under our noses.

Redwoods, it turns out, have two types of leaves that look different and perform very different tasks. This previously unknown feature helps the trees adapt to both wet and dry conditions – an ability that could be key to their survival in a changing climate. Redwoods can live for more than 2,000 years and grow to more than 350 feet tall.

Just enough water

Wherever trees grow, sooner or later their leaves get wet. For trees in wet environments, this can be a problem if films of water cover their stomata. These tiny pores allow carbon dioxide to enter leaves so the tree can combine it with water to make plant tissue through photosynthesis. Many trees that are common to wet forests have leaves with adaptations that prevent these water films from forming.

In contrast, trees growing in dry environments take advantage of brief bouts of leaf wetness to take up valuable water directly across the surfaces of their leaves, through special leaf structures, and even through their stomata. But some trees, including coast redwoods, live in both wet and dry environments with intense seasonal variation.

For broad-leaved trees like the holm oak, which grows in Mediterranean climates with dry summers and rainy winters, this seasonal wetness challenge is relatively easy to overcome. Their stomata are on the sheltered undersides of their leaves, which keeps them clear of water, while the leaves’ top surfaces absorb water. But redwoods are conifers, or cone-bearing trees, with thin, flat needlelike leaves, and they need a different way to balance the competing goals of repelling and absorbing water.

We knew we wanted to explore how redwoods met the paradoxical challenge of leaf wetness, how much water redwoods could absorb and which leaf features caused differences in water uptake capacity. What we learned came as a total surprise.

Big trees with big secrets

Scientists have long known about redwoods’ ability to absorb water through their leaves. But figuring out how much water redwoods can absorb this way, and how the capacity to do so might vary from one type of climate to another, is a real challenge in this species.

First, a big redwood has over 100 million leaves with a massive amount of surface area for water absorption. And these leaves drastically change structure with height, going from long and flat to short and awllike. So we couldn’t get this right by simply picking leaves at ground level.

To complicate matters further, gravity is always pushing down on the giant column of water rising upward through a redwood’s trunk. As a result, leaves at the top of the tree always have less available water than those lower down. The treetop’s inherent dryness should pull water into the leaf more quickly than into water-rich leaves at the bottom, just as a dry sponge picks up water faster than a damp one.

For an accurate picture of how redwoods absorbed water, we needed leaves from trees in wet and dry environments, and from multiple heights on those trees. To get them to their natural gravity-based water levels for analysis, we put our leaf samples in a fog chamber – in this case, an ice chest hooked up to a room humidifier – and measured weight gain over time to see how much water they could absorb.

A trail of clues

As we took apart clusters of redwood shoots to immerse them in fog, we divided each cluster into pieces. Redwood shoot clusters fan out from a woody core and are segmented into individual shoots of multiple ages, each with its own set of leaves. We separated shoots along the woody central axis from the much more common pliable shoots on the outer edges of each cluster.

It quickly became obvious that shoots from the center axis had leaves that could absorb water three times faster than peripheral leaves. When we looked inside the leaves with a microscope, we understood that they were two completely different types. They don’t look the same on the outside either, but this was so unexpected that we needed to see their internal structure to really convince ourselves.

The axial leaves were packed with water storage cells, but their phloem – tubes in the leaves that export photosynthetic sugars to the tree – appeared to be blocked and useless. If a tree has leaves, the conventional wisdom is that they are there for photosynthesis, but we wondered whether the axial leaves had a different purpose.

With some additional measurements, we found that redwoods’ axial leaves are specialized for absorbing water. Differences between the surfaces of axial and peripheral leaves, especially their wax coverage, cause the differences in their water absorption rates.

Unlike the axial leaves, redwoods’ peripheral leaves have waxy surfaces with lots of stomata. This helped to explain how they photosynthesize year-round regardless of the long wet season in much of their current habitat.

Further analysis showed that the redwoods’ axial leaves account for only about 5% of the trees’ total leaf area, and barely produce enough energy through photosynthesis to maintain themselves. But they contribute up to 30% of the trees’ total water absorption capacity. Together these two types of leaves balance the dueling requirements of photosynthesis and water absorption, allowing redwoods to thrive in both wet and dry habitats.

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Using large-scale tree measurements and equations for estimating redwood leaf area, we estimated that these thirsty giants can absorb as much as 105 pounds (48 kilograms) of water in the first hour of a rainfall wetting their leaves. That’s equivalent to 101 pints of beer.

The significance to redwoods

Understanding what causes the variation in redwood leaves’ uptake capacity can help us gauge differences in water uptake capabilities among trees and environments, now and in the future. In my opinion, this is the most potentially useful part of our study.

Redwoods vary their two leaf types to suit their local climates. In wet rainforests in the northern part of their range, above Mendocino County, the trees invest in fewer of the axial leaves that are specialized for absorbing water. These leaves are concentrated in the trees’ lower crowns, leaving the photosynthetically high-performing treetops free to maximize sugar production in the bright sun.

In dry forests on the southern margins of redwoods’ range, trees have more axial leaves in their water-stressed tops. This allows them to take better advantage of briefer leaf-wetting events, but it means they photosynthesize less per leaf area than redwoods in wetter areas.

Redwoods’ ability to shift leaf types to match regional climatic differences may help them adjust to climate change in an ever-drier California. That would be good news for conserving these epic trees, and it may be a promising feature to investigate as scientists try to link drought tolerance traits to regional differences among redwood populations.

Africa’s forests are some of the natural wonders of the world. As someone who has spent decades studying the ecology and management of tropical forests, I’m constantly amazed by the unique forest ecosystems on the continent.

Some of them are most likely unknown to the public at large, yet so fascinating and important to face our world’s current biodiversity and climate challenges. Starting in the northwest and ending in the southeast, I’d like to share the ones that are special to me. This is a totally personal choice; others would have chosen other unique African forests, so large is the choice. But for how long?

African forests, like many others, are threatened by over-exploitation, conversion to other land uses, and climate change. Many will likely disappear or be degraded to such an extent as to pass tipping points and become something else, something less.

I hope this trip across Africa will help raise interest and trigger the urge to better conserve and manage these unique ecosystems.

Morocco’s argan trees

Not far from Agadir, on the Moroccan Atlantic coast, grows the argan tree (Argania spinosa). It is the only member of the large Sapotaceae family growing in the northern hemisphere, the only species of its genus and endemic to an area of about 800,000 hectares.

It’s been exploited and managed by humans for more than 3,000 years for argan oil. Argan oil is the most expensive oil in the world, costing up to US$300 a litre in a US$500 million market. Argan oil is perhaps most commonly used as a moisturiser and is often found in products such as lotions, soaps and hair conditioners.

In addition to the oil, argan trees are also a source of wood for fencing, charcoal and fodder for goats. It’s a true multipurpose tree, critical especially for women’s livelihoods.

Unfortunately, despite its status as a UNESCO biosphere reserve, the argan forest is slowly dying from over-grazing, deforestation and climate change. Hopefully the argan oil boom will help to conserve and restore this unique forest ecosystem.

Congo Basin rainforest

Flying south-east, over the Sahara Desert and the Sahelian savannas, we reach the Congo Basin rainforest.

The Congo Basin rainforest is the second largest rainforest in the world (after the Amazon). It’s home to many forest giants, trees like the Sipo or Moabi. These and other giants are the origin of precious timber but also of important resources for local people, such as food and medicines. It’s also home to animals like forest elephants, buffaloes, and lowland gorillas.

Deep in the heart of the Congo Basin forests lies the largest peat swamp forest of the world. Only recently “discovered” by science, this place was known by the Aka community who live there as the place where roamed the Mokele Mbembe, a mythical dinosaur-like monster the size of an elephant.

No one has never seen it but now we know that this peatland forest stores more than 30 billion tonnes of carbon. Should these be released, by clearing the forest above, into the atmosphere, we will have unleashed a much worse monster than the Mokele Mbembe.

Fortunately, because of its remoteness and difficulty of access, the Congo Basin peatland complex has been naturally protected till now, but it could be threatened soon by oil exploration should we not pay attention.

East Africa’s Afromontane forests

At the eastern border of the Congo Basin rise the Ruwenzori mountains. On the mountain slopes are the last Afromontane forests.

These forests are home to the tallest tree in Africa, a whopping 81.5 metres tall Entandrophragma excelsum hidden in a remote valley of Mount Kilimanjaro.

These forests harbor a high level of endemism – meaning many of the trees can only be found here – and biodiversity. They also act as water towers, regulating and providing water for the lowlands and their inhabitants.

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These Afromontane forests store more carbon per hectare than the Amazon rainforest. Sadly, in the past 20 years, 0.8 million hectares of mountain forests have been lost to agriculture. This is mostly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda and Ethiopia. This has resulted in over 450 million tonnes of carbon dioxide being emitted into the atmosphere.

Miombo woodlands

Continuing our journey down south, we soon reach the immense area of Miombo woodlands. They span an estimated total area of around 2.7 million km² from Angola in the west to Tanzania in the east, and down to the northern edge of South Africa.

Over 65 million people rely on these ecosystems for their livelihoods, making use of resources such as fuelwood, timber, charcoal production, fruits, honey, mushrooms, medicinal plants, and fodder for livestock.

One tree species only makes the canopy, Colophospermum mopane.

They are an important ecosystem for large mammal diversity and biomass in southern Africa, including some of the most significant remaining populations of black rhinoceros, elephant, white rhinoceros, hippopotamus, buffalo, giraffe and greater kudu.

The forest is also the only source of a less emblematic but very important animal: the mopane worm. Gonimbrasia belina, by its Latin name, is a very important seasonal source of protein for the populations living near mopane woodlands.

Unfortunately, decline in mopane tree density, lower-than-normal precipitation, and higher-than-normal temperatures have significantly affected mopane worm availability and outbreak events, threatening the already precarious livelihoods of local populations.

Madagascar’s Spiny Forest

Crossing the Mozambique channel, we arrive in Madagascar. On the south-west of the “Grande Ile” grows the Spiny Forest. It’s a place like nowhere else on Earth, where endemic oddities like the octopus tree (Didierea madagascariensis) and other strange members of the Didieraceae family grow mixed with swollen baobabs (Adansonia rubrostipa) and other bottle trees (Pachypodium geayi).

The Spiny Forest is inhabited by even weirder animals, ghostly white lemurs impervious to thorns, birds that sing communally and a chameleon that spends most of its life as an egg.

Unfortunately like the other unique forest wonders of Africa, the Spiny Forest is threatened by over-exploitation for charcoal production as local farmers have been put out of business by the more and more unpredictable climate and have few other opportunities in the impoverished and dry Madagascar south-west.

We have reached the end of our trip over Africa. Our choices are subjective and we could have presented other forest wonders but we hope this will be enough to convince you of the importance of these ecosystems and of their threatened status because of us, humans. We should better protect and manage these ecosystems as we depend on them for our survival.

This image, taken in 1993, shows historical forests of Atlas Cedar in Morocco that are most vulnerable to a hotter, drier climate. Photo: Csaba Mátyás, professor emeritus, University of Sopron, Hungary.

By: Kirsten Romaguera

How hot is too hot, and how dry is too dry, for the Earth’s forests? A new study from an international team of researchers found the answers – by looking at decades of dying trees.

Just published in the journal Nature Communications, the study compiles the first global database of precisely georeferenced forest die-off events at 675 locations dating back to 1970. The study, which encompasses all forested continents, then compares that information to existing climate data to determine the heat and drought climatic conditions that caused these documented tree mortality episodes.

“In this study, we’re letting the Earth’s forests do the talking,” said William Hammond, a University of Florida plant ecophysiologist who led the study. “We collected data from previous studies documenting where and when trees died, and then analyzed what the climate was during mortality events, compared to long-term conditions.”

After performing the climate analysis on the observed forest mortality data, Hammond noted, a pattern emerged.

“What we found was that at the global scale, there was this consistently hotter, drier pattern – what we call a ‘hotter-drought fingerprint’ – that can show us how unusually hot or dry it has to get for forests to be at risk of death,” said Hammond, an assistant professor in the UF/IFAS agronomy department.

The fingerprint, he says, shows that forest mortality events consistently occurred when the typically hottest and driest months of the year got even warmer and drier.

“Our hotter-drought fingerprint revealed that global forest mortality is linked to intensified climate extremes,” Hammond said. “Using climate model data, we estimated how frequent these previously lethal climate conditions would become under further warming, compared to pre-industrial era climate – 22% more frequent at plus 2 degrees Celsius (plus 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), to 140% more frequently at plus 4 degrees Celsius (plus 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit).”

Those higher temperatures would more than double how often forests around the world see tree-killing droughts, he adds.

“Plants do a phenomenal job of capturing and sequestering carbon,” Hammond said. “But death of the plants not only prevents their performing this critical carbon-capturing role, plants also start releasing carbon as they decay.”

Hammond says that relying, in part, upon trees and other plants to capture and sequester carbon, as some proposed climate solutions suggest, makes it is critical to understand how hot is ‘too hot,’ and how dry is ‘too dry’. “Otherwise mortality events, like those included in our database, may wipe out planned carbon gains.”

One of the study’s co-authors, Cuauhtémoc Sáenz-Romero of Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo in Mexico, offered an example of how recent climate patterns affected a Mexican temperate forest.

“In recent years, the dry and warm March to May season is even more dry than usual, but also warmer than ever,” he said. “This combination is inducing a lot of stress on the trees before the arrival of the next June-to-October rainy season. For example, in 2021, more than 8,000 mature trees were killed by bark beetles in the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve in Central Mexico. The effect of the La Niña Pacific Ocean stream resulted in drier, warmer conditions, a deadly combination that favored pest outbreaks.”

Hammond has also developed an interactive application on the website of the International Tree Mortality Network to host the database online and to allow others to submit additional observations of forest mortality to the database.

The organization, founded and coordinated by co-author Henrik Hartmann from the Max Planck Institute in Germany, among others, is a collaborative effort between scientists on every forested continent and aims to coordinate international research efforts on forest die-off events. Hammond is the network’s data management group leader.

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EXPLAINERS

‘Georeferenced’

Using maps or aerial images, scientists assign to them real-world coordinates.

‘Ground-truthed’

Information confirmed or validated by direct observation and measurement. In the case of machine learning, it refers to checking results for accuracy.

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“We’re hoping that this paper will create a bit of urgency around the need to understand the role of warming on forest mortality,” Hammond said. “Also, we expect that our open-access database will enable additional studies, including other climate fingerprints from local to regional scales. Current climate modeling and remote-sensing research communities need ground-truthed datasets to validate their predictions of important processes like forest mortality. One of the really important elements to this study was bringing all this data together for the first time, so that we can ask a question like this at the planetary scale.”

The paper, “Global field observations of tree die-off reveal hotter-drought fingerprint for Earth’s forests,” can be accessed at nature.com/articles/s41467-022-29289-2. In addition to Hammond, Sáenz-Romero and Hartmann, it is also co-authored by A. Park Williams, University of California, Los Angeles; John Abatzoglou, University of California, Merced; Henry D. Adams, Washington State University; Tamir Klein, Weizmann Institute of Science; Rosana López, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain; David D. Breshears, University of Arizona; and Craig D. Allen, University of New Mexico.

As part of its efforts to protect and enhance Melbourne’s tree cover, some 3,000 trees are planted in the city each year. This juvenile Cinnamomum camphor laurel tree was planted on Exhibition Street in Melbourne’s central business district in 2021. Credit…Alana Holmberg for The New York Times

A program in Melbourne, Australia, that tracks every public tree — and even gives each an email address — is seen as a way to manage climate change.

By Peter Wilson

MELBOURNE, Australia — High in the branches of a 122-year-old Dutch Elm, two workers in a bucket crane framed by the city’s skyline used a chain saw to slice large limbs from the top of the tree.

Office workers strolled past, seemingly enjoying the afternoon sunshine of Flagstaff Gardens, the city’s oldest public park, while the workers carried out their “reduction pruning” aimed at controlling the tree’s bulk to help improve its vitality and extend its lifespan.

It is one of the most time-tested forms of tree maintenance, but at ground level, the workers’ supervisor, Jake Shepherd, added a high-tech wrinkle.

Mr. Shepherd, a 27-year-old Englishman, touched a yellow circle on a portable electronic device. The circle was within a map of the park that is part of the city’s elaborate tree database and it instantly turned green to register that this specific elm was back in top shape.

Across town in the Queen Victoria Gardens, another crew recorded the results of its own maintenance work so that it also could be entered into the database, a crucial part of an innovative forest management scheme that has attracted attention around the world because of its successful focus on community engagement.

New York, Denver, Shanghai, Ottawa, and Los Angeles have all unveiled Million Tree Initiatives aimed at greatly increasing their urban forests because of the ability of trees to reduce city temperatures, absorb carbon dioxide and soak up excess rainfall.

Central Melbourne, on the other hand, lacks those cities’ financial firepower and is planning to plant a little more than 3,000 trees a year over the next decade. Yet it has gained the interest of other cities by using its extensive data to shore up the community engagement and political commitment required to sustain the decades-long work of building urban forests.

A small municipality covering just 14.5 square miles in the center of the greater Melbourne metropolitan area — which sprawls for 3,860 square miles and houses 5.2 million people in 31 municipalities — the city of Melbourne introduced its online map in 2013.

Called the Urban Forest Visual, the map displayed each of the 80,000 trees in its parks and streets, and showed each tree’s age, species and health. It also gave each tree its own email address so that people could help to monitor them and alert council workers to any specific problems.

That is when the magic happened.

City officials were surprised to see the trees receiving thousands of love letters. They ranged from jaunty greetings — “good luck with the photosynthesis” — to love poems and emotional tributes about how much joy the trees brought to people’s lives.

Members of the public were subsequently recruited to help with forestry programs such as measuring trees and monitoring wildlife, and politicians were left in no doubt about how much Melburnians valued their trees.

City of Melbourne councilors of all political stripes agreed on the ambitious goal of increasing their tree canopy cover to 40 percent of public land by 2040, from 23 percent in 2012.

Their plan is on track after a decade and has been gradually replacing many of the grand European elms and London plane trees that shade the city’s widest boulevards, moving instead to indigenous species such as eucalyptus and other trees better able to cope with climate change.

Abigail Brydon, a 40-year-old project manager for a telecommunications firm, echoed the widespread affection for the city’s greenery as she took a walk past the elm that was being worked on by Mr. Shepherd and his team.

“I have always loved the city’s trees and parks but more than ever during lockdown,” she said, explaining that she was halfway through her twice-daily “sanity check” of a 15-minute walk around the park.

“A lap of the park clears my head, then I can go back inside and get back to work,” she said. “There are even more people now than there used to be sitting under the trees and wandering around, and Covid hasn’t stopped the city from keeping the park fantastically maintained.”

A walk around the central business district showed a series of recent plantings, including a spindly stand of lemon-scented gums on Flinders Street; new “green” tram tracks on Southbank; and a row of 7-foot camphor laurels near the theaters on Exhibition Street.

Melbourne’s outbreak of talking to trees was noticed far and wide, particularly among urban planners such as Gillian Dick, who helps to plan the forests of Glasgow.

Ms. Dick planned to pay tribute to the Melbourne experience on March 30 when she addresses a global online event on urban ecosystems, the Nature of Cities festival, about ways to encourage city dwellers to appreciate their local trees.

“In Glasgow we have set up a website and a Twitter account to capture community stories about what the city’s trees mean to people, to give us some background information for developing our forest and woodland strategy,” Ms. Dick explained in a telephone interview.

“It’s no good planting millions of trees if you are not going to have the community buy-in to sustain the long-term support you need to make a success of those trees, and if you look around the world at that sort of community engagement with trees, Melbourne’s experience is just amazing.”

“They accidentally discovered the latent desire of people to say how much the trees meant to them.”

Cathy Oke, a former Green Party city councilor who played a pivotal role in Melbourne’s tree policies, said data and evidence-based decisions had been crucial since the city revamped its forest strategy in 2012 after discovering that a 12-year drought had left 40 percent of its trees declining or dying.

Many of its most impressive trees were planted in large batches as far back as 1875, meaning that whole blocks of trees would die at the same time and need to be replaced by immature trees unless they were steadily replaced in advance.

“We learned from what other cities were doing, especially New York with its planting of a million trees,” said Dr. Oke, a researcher in urban sustainability at the University of Melbourne.

The program has evolved to focus not only on trees but also on biodiversity including flowers, insects, and native animals. Rohan Leppert, a councilor who now leads the forest program, says the city will soon launch an online “biodiversity visual.”

“In all these things, we are bending over backward to do hyperlocal consultations to find out what trees people want in their own streets because these sort of changes work best when you do them with the community, not to the community,” Mr. Leppert said.

“We are determined to keep at it for the long term because keeping the city cool by planting trees is the single most cost-effective thing we can do to mitigate against climate change,” he said, noting that a healthy tree canopy can reduce a city’s temperature by 4 degrees to 6 degrees Celsius, or 7.2 to 10.8 degrees Fahrenheit.

James Fitzsimons, the director of conservation and science for the Nature Conservancy Australia, said the city of Melbourne’s successful forest strategy had not been matched across the wider metropolitan area, but attempts were underway to get a more united approach to forestry.

“The big challenge is that there is talk about Melbourne doubling its population size by 2050, so housing is becoming much denser and we’re losing native vegetation,” he said.

Gregory Moore, an expert on ecosystems and forests at the University of Melbourne, said another major problem was that planning laws controlled by the state of Victoria did little to protect greenery on private land, allowing development that contributed to the annual loss of 1.5 percent of canopy cover across the greater metropolitan area.

“A good tree cover can save you an enormous amount in health spending alone by reducing deaths in heatwaves and getting people outside and taking more exercise,” he said. “Politicians and bureaucrats seem to think that all of these benefits from planting trees are simply too good to be true, but I think they will eventually get the point when economists keep telling them how much money they will save.”

A version of this article appears in print on March 29, 2022, Section A, Page 10 in The New York Times International Edition.

Changing the genetic makeup of trees could supercharge their ability to suck up carbon dioxide. But are forests of frankentrees really a good idea?

Of all the potential fixes for the climate crisis, none has captured hearts and minds quite like tree planting. It’s a goal that seemingly everyone can agree on: Scientists, politicians, even billionaires are putting their heft behind efforts to green the land with new forests that will capture carbon and—hopefully—lock it away in trunks and soil for decades.

But no climate fix is ever that simple. Multiple studies have found that tree-planting campaigns don’t always deliver the benefits they promise. If newly planted forests aren’t properly cared for and monitored, the trees can die and any carbon they stored will be released back into the atmosphere. Sometimes there aren’t enough seedlings for these programs in the first place. The mass enthusiasm for tree-planting programs has sparked a partial backlash, with scientists arguing that planting trees is important, sure, but we shouldn’t kid ourselves that it’s a silver bullet for the vast challenges of the climate crisis.

Other scientists point to a different problem with mass tree-planting efforts: the trees themselves. What if existing trees just aren’t good enough at storing carbon? If scientists could find a way to increase trees’ carbon-sucking potential, we’d be unlocking more cost-effective carbon capture with every tree planted. A better tree could be what we’ve been waiting for. We just have to make it.

Maddie Hall, CEO and founder of the climate startup Living Carbon, is looking for the Tesla of trees. “Not just a tree that’s better for the environment, but a tree that grows faster and might be able to survive or perform better in climates than traditional varieties,” she says. “A lot of that comes down to how you could improve the growth rate and also carbon-capture potential of trees.”

The way that plants take carbon dioxide and sunlight and turn them into living material is nothing short of miraculous, a biological alchemy that supports almost all life on Earth. But this process—photosynthesis—is also woefully inefficient. Only a tiny fraction of sunlight that falls on leaves actually gets turned into living material—in the case of most plants around 95 percent of all that energy is wasted. For plant scientists like Amanda Cavanagh at the University of Essex, UK, this waste looks like an opportunity. If she can find a way to get plants to cut out some of this inefficiency, trees might put that energy into growth instead. Like most researchers in this area, Cavanagh’s focus is on faster-growing crops that can feed more people, but the same approach could be a boon for pulling carbon from the atmosphere, too. Photosynthesis-enhanced trees should be quicker at turning atmospheric carbon into trunks, leaves, and roots. That’s the theory, at least.

In 2019, Cavanagh and her colleagues published a paper in Science that strongly suggested they were on to something. By inserting a couple of new genes into tobacco plants, the scientists could get them to recycle a waste product of photosynthesis back into a molecule the plant could use to grow. Once they were planted, Cavanagh’s edited tobacco plants were 40 percent more productive than their non-edited equivalents. (Tobacco plants are the lab rats of the plant science world—the ultimate goal is to repeat this trick with crops like wheat or soy.)

Now a Californian startup has taken the same approach, but this time with poplar trees. In a non-peer-reviewed preprint first posted on February 19, scientists at Living Carbon claimed that by inserting new genes into poplar trees, they can make the plants grow 53 percent more quickly than their non-edited equivalents. Both sets of trees were grown under controlled conditions that differ significantly from the ones the plants would face in the wild, but Hall hopes that the edited trees will supercharge tree-planting plans by drawing down atmospheric carbon more quickly.

“Our belief is that climate change is a problem of relative rates. And also it’s one that we can’t just solve with man-made, intensely managed human processes like direct air capture,” she says. (Direct air capture means building devices that could scrub atmospheric carbon dioxide—or others that might trap methane—but by one recent estimate it could take 10,000 such machines to make a difference in CO₂ levels.) Living Carbon’s eventual business model will be to plant its genetically engineered trees on land leased from private landowners, then give those landowners a share of the money earned by selling carbon credits earned against the growth of the trees.

When most plants photosynthesize, they produce a toxic byproduct called phosphoglycolate, which they then have to use energy to break down—a process called photorespiration. Living Carbon’s edited trees have extra genes from algae and pumpkin that help the plant use less energy to break it down, as well as recycling some of the sugars created by this process. This pathway was an obvious target for making plants more efficient, says Yumin Tao, Living Carbon’s VP of biotechnology. “You channel that byproduct into energy and nutrients for plant growth,” says Tao. And more plant growth means more carbon captured.

Tao and his colleagues grew the genetically engineered poplars for 21 weeks in a lab before harvesting and weighing them to see how much biomass they’d accumulated. The best-performing seedling had 53 percent more above-ground biomass than non-edited plants. Tests also showed that the edited plants took up more carbon than their non-edited cousins, an indication that these plants had a higher rate of photosynthesis.

“It’s a really exciting first step,” says Cavanagh, who was not involved in Living Carbon’s research. But she cautions that we don’t know whether these trees will be better at storing carbon in the long run. Living Carbon’s poplars were harvested after only five months, but in the wild, the trees can live for more than 50 years. Only further studies will reveal whether the edited trees will continue to grow quickly as they mature. Their growth rate might slow, or they might become so unhealthy that they fall over and release all that carbon back into the atmosphere when they rot. “Is the effect you see at the seedling phase the same at different stages of maturity, or does the plant fight back?” asks Cavanagh.

Soon this will be put to the test. Living Carbon has already planted 468 of its photosynthesis-enhanced trees in central Oregon, part of a field trial it’s running with Oregon State University. The company will analyze how quickly the trees grow over longer periods of time and also how they perform in different environments. It has also secured agreements to plant poplars created using a slightly different technique on around 3,500 acres of private land in the US, with the first plantings scheduled to start in late 2022, according to Hall.

But releasing genetically engineered trees into the wild is still controversial. Researchers at the State University of New York have engineered a chestnut tree that is resistant to a blight that has ravaged the species in the US, but the tree has still not been approved by the Department of Agriculture. Only two genetically engineered trees have been approved in the US: varieties of virus-resistant papaya and plum trees. The trees that Living Carbon is currently working with don’t produce pollen, which should limit the problem of genetic material from the edited plants mixing with wild trees.

But some plant scientists think there’s a simpler path to making a better tree: cultivating them the old-fashioned way. Humans have been breeding better crops for thousands of years, says Richard Buggs, an evolutionary biologist who studies plant health at Kew Gardens in London. “I’m totally in agreement with that core premise that we need trees that are more productive and fix carbon faster. I just think there are fantastic opportunities to do that by variation that already exists in nature,” says Buggs. Typically, cultivation means either hybridizing two varieties through cross-pollination—fertilizing the flowers of one tree with the pollen of another—or reinforcing a desirable trait within a species by self-pollinating a plant with that trait.

Rather than meddling with something as fundamental as photosynthesis, Buggs suggests there are other traits that might be useful for making more efficient trees. “There are actually lots of things that are already happening in nature that affect the growth of a tree that we could be working with,” he says, like variation in how quickly trees grow, how straight their trunks are, and when they drop their leaves. All would affect their suitability for carbon capture, Buggs says. “I would prefer that kind of approach. I think it’s more realistic, and you’re much more likely to end up with a tree that will survive and fix carbon in the long term in natural environments.”

Hall doesn’t actually envisage giant public forests of genetically engineered trees. She says that most of the time her trees will eventually be cut down for timber—another reason to find a way to speed up their growth. Other companies are interested in fast-growing trees too: In 2015 the Brazilian government approved a eucalyptus tree engineered by a paper-producing firm to produce 20 percent more wood than conventional trees.

The debate between natural breeding and genetic engineering has been bubbling along in the agricultural world for more than half a century. Now a similar conversation is starting to play out when it comes to forestry. We might be able to cultivate more productive trees, but that approach could take decades. We might not have that kind of time, Cavanagh says. “Thirty years will be the end of my career,” she says. “I would like to know I’ve done everything I can to make sure that there are solutions if things look as bad as the worst-case projections.”

As the climate warms, this insect’s population is booming. That’s bad news for the ponderosa pines of the Sierra Nevada.

As he drove through the Sierra Nevada in 2019, Zachary Robbins noticed all the dead trees. Most of them had probably died around 2016 thanks to a combination of California’s drought and its growing population of bark beetles—tiny creatures that kill giant trees. Although workers had tried to salvage whatever they could for commercial timber, Robbins, a researcher in the Dynamic Ecosystems and Landscapes Lab at North Carolina State University, was astounded by how many withered pines still dotted the forest.

Of some 600 species of bark beetles, the western pine beetle is prevalent in this region. They chew away at bark and live within the phloem of ponderosa pines, the living tissue that transports nutrients. The infestation creates bark beetle “galleries” that look like long-legged centipedes living within the tree; these can kill the host by cutting off nutrient flow. Dead trees can present a perilous situation to nearby residents because they create more flammable material for wildfires.

According to the US Forest Service, about 150 million trees died during the state’s five-year drought, which ran from 2012 to 2016, and in its aftermath. Drought itself kills trees, but the lack of water also weakens them, making them easier for the beetles to attack. These infestations can be fatal for pines—a 2019 study found that among ponderosa pines attacked by bark beetles following the drought, an estimated 90 percent of them died.

Talking it over later with his colleagues, Robbins thought the pine die-off might be attributable to climate change: A warmer climate would mean more beetles, and more beetles would mean more dead trees. “We realized that this landscape will be fundamentally different in the next century,” Robbins says.

To test the theory, Robbins and his team used a computer model to show how both drought and warming temperatures could affect the Sierra Nevada. The data for their model was gleaned from other studies based on either satellite imaging or academic field researchers who counted the number of trees that have already died from beetle infestations. In a paper published in October in Global Change Biology, the team wrote that their model calculated that for each 1 degree Celsius that temperature rises, the number of dead trees will increase by about 20 percent, thanks to the increased success of the beetle population. During a drought, their model showed, this figure can worsen, climbing to 35 to 40 percent.

Beetles have more success in a drier, warmer climate because trees are more stressed. When an insect starts to chew through bark, a tree has a chance to defend itself by releasing waxy resin and chemicals to push the critter out. But under the stress of droughts, trees close the pores in their leaves and needles, reducing their ability to photosynthesize and create the carbon the tree needs to live. The tree then devotes its resources to tissue maintenance, making less of these defense chemicals and resins. All of this creates an opportunity for bark beetles to invade.

At the same time, the life cycle of the beetle speeds up. These creatures are ectotherms, which means their function depends on the external temperature. If temperatures rise, they reach reproductive age sooner and produce more and more offspring.

“Warming temperatures allow bark beetles to go through stages of maturation more quickly, allowing populations to grow to larger, more explosive sizes,” says Chris Williams, director of environmental sciences at Clark University in Massachusetts, who studies droughts, bark beetles, and wildfires. Their larvae live within the tree, and when they are old enough, they turn into beetles, which fly out to find other trees to destroy. Once they start an invasion, they release pheromones, which signal to other beetles that there is room for more. (Beetles are also less likely to die during a warmer winter, but Robbins says this was not a main factor in his California study.)

The 2012 to 2016 drought was particularly harmful because of just how long it lasted. But 2018, 2020, and 2021 have also been extreme drought years. Tom Smith, a California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection senior plant pathologist, has witnessed the droughts’ effects firsthand. “We are seeing this right now with increased bark beetle activity of the western pine bark beetle and other species around California while we enter yet another year of drought,” Smith says. “My major concern is that with the vast number of dead trees on the landscape there is a huge amount of dry fuel just waiting to burn.” These tree graveyards act as catalysts for the landscape-scale wildfires that have been plaguing California.

Mass deaths of 100-year-old ponderosa pines can increase the risk of wildfire for another reason: The pines are a fire-resistant species due to their thick bark. Yet after a beetle outbreak, the old trees are replaced by much younger pines and also incense cedars, which are less resistant. The combination of younger trees that can ignite more easily with dead trees that provide fuel is a recipe for high-intensity forest fires.

Robbins and his team of researchers were floored that a small environmental change, like 1 degree Celsius of warming, could have such long-lasting effects. “This is one of those instances of climate change where there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle,” Robbins says. “Those trees, many were hundreds of years old, and they’re now dead—and they won’t be back for another 100 years.”

“Climate change is not a future event. We are living through the results of the altered climate now,” Robbins continues. “Our ecology is already behaving in ways we could not have predicted, and we will have to manage forests and natural resources with this assumption.”

But what might some of those management decisions be? Robbins thinks that increasing forest diversity will be a protective factor against bark beetle attacks. “And not just tree species, but tree ages,” Robbins says. “We often have trees that are the same age, and they’re all susceptible to bark beetle attacks at similar times.” Without reforestation efforts, Robbins thinks that forests may convert to chaparral shrublands.

Controlled burns to get rid of dead material should be part of the answer, Robbins says, but the sheer scale necessary is enormous. Smith wants to see this happen, too, but he agrees that there are some roadblocks: The right weather conditions don’t occur regularly, the terrain is often difficult to work with, and there are limited numbers of trained fire personnel. “The best option would have been to harvest the trees quickly to remove the dry fuel,” Smith says, but the cost of transportation is prohibitive and there are only so many mills ready to process the timber.

Biogeneration plants, which convert forest residue to heat for power generation, would be another option, Smith says, but not enough of them exist. He also thinks it’s important to educate people about fire prevention, as the National Park Service estimates that 85 percent of fires are human-caused.

It’s harder to imagine a solution directed just at the beetles. Their natural predators are white-headed woodpeckers and black-bellied clerid beetles, but Robbins doesn’t think it would be wise to increase the number of these predators. This is because during non-outbreak years, when beetle populations are low, the predator population would quickly collapse, undoing all the work. Another idea might be to use another kind of pheromone the beetles produce, one that lets their compatriots know when space has run out. But, Robbins adds, that’s not realistic given the size of the forest. 

Now, Robbins is looking ahead to how his team’s model can be applied to other ecosystems that might host the same kind of beetle. “We think about the ponderosa pines throughout Oregon and Washington,” he says. “They may also be impacted by these things—just not yet.”

The finished resort will have 130 treehouses on 40 acres in East Tennessee.

By Rachel Chang March 22, 2022

When Amanda Jensen’s four kids were younger, her husband Brian built them a treehouse, complete with bunk beds, a trap door, a swing, and a zip line. “After the kids decided they were on to more important things than playing in it, we joked about renting it out because treehouses were becoming ‘a thing,'” she told Travel + Leisure.

But after staying at an impressive treehouse in South Carolina themselves, they’ve turned that thought about their kids’ playhouse into even bigger ambitions. They’ve set out to build what they hope will become the world’s biggest treehouse resort, called Sanctuary Treehouse Resort, in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. When it’s completed, it will be the largest in the world with 130 treehouses spread out across 40 acres. Most of the treehouses will be in rows, but a few will be in circular pod formation.

The couple is working with Mountain Modern Architectural firm MossCreek to bring their vision to life. The resort will feature three types of accommodations. The Tree Fort can accommodate two to six guests and will have a king-size bed with a queen-size trundle bed that rolls out underneath and a bunk bed, along with a LED fireplace, kitchenette, whiskey barrel bathroom sink, and shower, plus a deck with Adirondack chairs, a grill, and wood-burning fireplace. But the real design fun comes with the tree house’s spiral slide, climbing rope, bucket pulley, net swing, secret ladder, trapdoor, telescope, and even a custom drink shoot for bottles and cans from the kitchen to the lower porch. For group accommodations, there will also be a Tree Fort Double, which is two of the treehouses connected with a movable drawbridge. Finally, the Luxe accommodation steps everything up a notch with a king-size gel cooling bed, copper clawfoot bathtub, bamboo jet shower, heated bidet toilet system, and outdoor tub.

“It will not be just a place to stay with astounding views, you will be able to interact and play in your treehouse, just as you would a ‘real’ treehouse,” Jensen said of the playful features.

About six to 10 of the treehouses will be available for stays starting this summer, with the rest of the first phase rolling out through the rest of the year. By the end of 2023, there will be about 30 units, as well as a check-in area. The plan is to keep building another 20 to 25 units each year until the resort is complete.

The Jensens, who also run the Gaitlinburg SkyCenter at the top of the Gatlinburg SkyLift, originally had planned just to build a handful of treehouses to rent out on their own property, but once they heard that the 40-acre site was available, they knew they had to expand their plans, especially since other potential buyers were looking to raze the area for apartments and other buildings. “We want to preserve the property as it is and build around the trees and into the existing landscape to respect its beauty and the nature that lives there,” she said of the property they just started construction on this year.

The resort will eventually also have walking trails, a community area, a central hot tub, and a lit enchanted forest for events and gatherings. Also part of the draw is its East Tennessee location, near two 18-hole golf courses and Great Smoky National Park.

“We are cultivating a unique resort like no other anywhere for guests to stay, play, and retreat for a one-of-a-kind experience,” the couple said. “We hope to provide our guests with lasting memories, breathtaking views, and customizable options to leave them with a desire to come back and stay with us year after year.”

Learn more about Sanctuary Treehouse Resort and follow the property’s progress here.

A blight on our native ecosystem, these trees look gorgeous but bring a huge cost.

By Andrew Freiden Published: Mar. 23, 2022 at 4:33 PM EDT

RICHMOND, Va. (WWBT) – They are a staple of early spring and easy to spot: those puffy white Bradford pear trees. But once you get to know them, they are easy to hate.

Some central Virginia garden centers, like the Great Big Greenhouse and Cross Creek Nursery, don’t even carry them anymore. But they carry on in our landscape.

1. The first thing that’s wrong with a Bradford pear is its structure.

They have huge heavy limbs that all radiate out from one point. That makes the tree exceptionally weak and prone to breakage once it matures. When high winds hit – or snow or ice – these trees come apart easily. That’s a lot of weight coming down on a person, car, roof, or even a power line.

2. The second (and biggest) problem? They are invasive and spreading.

Once you see the puffy white trees in early spring, you’ll see them everywhere. Originally from China, they don’t have any threats here.

“They’ve been liberated from their predators in pathogens in their native range and brought to a place where they don’t have these predators or diseases so their energy is freed up to grow and reproduce,” said Kevin Heffernan, a Stewardship Biologist at Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation.

And they are really good at reproducing.

Originally thought to be sterile, when Bradford pear blossoms get cross-pollinated by bees, fruit production begins. It doesn’t look like a pear you get at the grocery store, but native birds love the small, sugary fruit. Sadly, it’s basically junk food and hurts our songbird’s ability to migrate.

Heffernan says eating the pear fruits, “tend to debilitate species ability to get all the way to their destinations. They should be filling up with more fatty fruits from other species.”

Plus, the birds spread the trees far and wide. If you look alongside highways and in unmaintained areas, you’ll see the white trees easily. They are one of the first trees to bloom in our early spring landscape.

And once they start running wild, they revert to their rootstock: a Callery pear. And that tree is nasty. It forms a thicket, crowding out native trees and it has huge, sharp thorns.

That makes it very hard to remove once it takes over an area. Just ask Laura Greenleaf, she spends her days removing invasive species and teaching others about them, and she says this piece of land, like many others across the state, just isn’t right.

“Ideally, this would be a naturalized area of the native Flora. native trees shrubs and a herbaceous layer,” she said.

Here’s more on Laura’s efforts to remove Bradford Pears from Richmond’s Forest Hill Park.

And it’s not just us! Many other states are realizing the error of our planting ways. In South Carolina, there’s even a bounty! If you send a picture of a Bradford pear you cut down, they’ll give you a free native tree!

That hasn’t happened in Virginia, yet.

3. The third thing: they smell horrible.

Pretty much everyone agrees on that.

So cut them down if you have them in your yard. Spring is a great time because you can easily spot them.

Laura Greenleaf and Kevin Heffernan gave me a great list of links that might be helpful if you are interested in learning more about invasive species and how changes you make at your house can help our native species.

VA Department of Conservation & Recreation:

• Smart Pollinators
• Invasive Plant Species (virginia.gov)

Virginia Native Plant Society (includes a list of native plant nurseries & sales)

• Virginia Native Plant Society – Conserving Wild Flowers & Places (vnps.org)

Blue Ridge PRISM (Partnership for Regional Invasive Species Management). While PRISM is based in a different region, many of the invasives are statewide or common to central piedmont as well.

• Blue Ridge PRISM Inc – Invasive Species in the northern Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia

Homegrown National Park – Tallamy’s Hub

• ABOUT US — HOMEGROWN NATIONAL PARK

There are also some upcoming events to attend if you’d like to learn more:

• Saturday, April 30 at Dorey Park: Henrico County Native Plant Festival (keynote speaker Doug Tallamy)
• Saturday, May 7 at Richmond Public Library “Library Park”, main branch: Garden Learning Day featuring members of the JRPS Invasive Plant Task Force and Richmond Master Gardeners

Copyright 2022 WWBT. All rights reserved.

Reforestation can fight climate change, uplift communities, and restore biodiversity. When done badly, though, it can speed extinctions and make nature less resilient.

A tree planted for every T-shirt purchased. For every bottle of wine. For every swipe of a credit card. Trees planted by countries to meet global pledges and by companies to bolster their sustainability records.

As the climate crisis deepens, businesses and consumers are joining nonprofit groups and governments in a global tree planting boom. Last year saw billions of trees planted in scores of countries around the world. These efforts can be a triple win, providing livelihoods, absorbing and locking away planet-warming carbon dioxide, and improving the health of ecosystems.

But when done poorly, the projects can worsen the very problems they were meant to solve. Planting the wrong trees in the wrong place can actually reduce biodiversity, speeding extinctions and making ecosystems far less resilient.

Addressing biodiversity loss, already a global crisis akin to climate change, is becoming more and more urgent. Extinction rates are surging. An estimated million species are at risk of disappearing, many within decades. And ecosystem collapse doesn’t just threaten animals and plants; it imperils the food and water supplies that humans rely on.

Amid that worsening crisis, companies and countries are increasingly investing in tree planting that carpets large areas with commercial, nonnative species in the name of fighting climate change. These trees sock away carbon but provide little support to the webs of life that once thrived in those areas.

“You’re creating basically a sterile landscape,” said Paul Smith, who runs Botanic Gardens Conservation International, an umbrella group that works to prevent plant extinctions. “If people want to plant trees, let’s also make it a positive for biodiversity.”

There’s a rule of thumb in the tree planting world: One should plant “the right tree in the right place.” Some add, “for the right reason.”

But, according to interviews with a range of players — scientists, policy experts, forestry companies and tree planting organizations — people often disagree on what “right” means. For some, it’s big tree farms for carbon storage and timber. For others, it’s providing fruit trees to small-scale farmers. For others still, it’s allowing native species to regenerate.

The best efforts try to address a range of needs, according to restoration experts, but it can be hard to reconcile competing interests.

“It’s kind of the Wild West,” said Forrest Fleischman, a professor of environmental policy at the University of Minnesota.

‘Harm in the Name of Doing Good’

There is not enough land on Earth to tackle climate change with trees alone, but if paired with drastic cuts in fossil fuels, trees can be an important natural solution. They absorb carbon dioxide through pores in their leaves and stash it away in their branches and trunks (though trees also release carbon when they burn or rot). That ability to collect CO2 is why forests are often called carbon sinks.

In Central Africa, TotalEnergies, the French oil and gas giant, has announced plans to plant trees on 40,000-hectares in the Republic of Congo. The project — on the Batéké Plateau, a rolling mosaic of grasses and wooded savanna with patches of denser forests — would sequester more than 10 million tons of carbon dioxide over 20 years, according to the company.

“Total is committing to the development of natural carbon sinks in Africa,” said Nicolas Terraz, who was then Total’s senior vice president for Africa, exploration and production, in a company news release on the project in 2021. “These activities build on the priority initiatives taken by the group to avoid and reduce emissions, in line with its ambition to get to net-zero by 2050.”

To achieve net-zero, companies must remove at least as much carbon from the air as they release. Many, like TotalEnergies, are turning to trees for help with that. On the Batéké Plateau, an acacia species from Australia, intended for selective logging, will cover a large area.

The project, part of a Congolese government program to expand forest cover and increase carbon storage, would create jobs, the company said, and ultimately broaden the ecosystem’s biodiversity as local species are allowed to grow in over decades.

But scientists warn that the plan may be an example of one of the worst kinds of forestation efforts: planting trees where they would not naturally occur. These projects can devastate biodiversity, threaten water supplies and even increase temperatures because, in some cases, trees absorb heat that grasslands — or, in other parts of the world, snow — would have reflected.

“We don’t want to cause harm in the name of doing good,” said Bethanie Walder, executive director of the Society for Ecological Restoration, a global nonprofit.

The Batéké Plateau is one of the least-studied ecosystems in Africa, according to Paula Nieto Quintano, an environmental scientist who has focused on the region. “Its importance for local livelihoods, its ecology and ecosystem functions are poorly understood,” Dr. Nieto said.

Those who study forest restoration emphasize that trees are not a cure-all.

“I fear that many corporations and governments are seeing this as an easy way out,” said Robin Chazdon, a professor of tropical forest restoration at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia. “They don’t necessarily have to work as hard to reduce their emissions because they can just say, ‘Oh, we’re offsetting that by planting trees’.”

‘There Have Been Bad Actors’

All trees store carbon, but their other benefits vary widely depending on the species and where it’s planted.

Eucalyptus, for instance, grows fast and straight, making it a lucrative lumber product. Native to Australia and a few islands to the north, its leaves feed koalas, which evolved to tolerate a potent poison they contain. But in Africa and South America — where the trees are widely grown for timber, fuel and, increasingly, carbon storage — they provide far less value to wildlife. They are also blamed for depleting water and worsening wildfires.

Experts acknowledge that forest restoration and carbon sequestration are complex, and that commercial species have a role to play. People need timber, a renewable product with a lower carbon footprint than concrete or steel. They need paper and fuel for cooking.

Understand the Latest News on Climate Change

Planting fast-growing species for harvest can sometimes help preserve surrounding native forests. And, by strategically adding native species, tree farms can help biodiversity by creating wildlife corridors to link disconnected habitat areas.

“This restoration movement can’t happen without the private sector,” said Michael Becker, head of communications at 1t.org, a group created by the World Economic Forum to push for the conservation and growth of one trillion trees with help from private investment. “Historically, there have been bad actors, but we need to bring them into the fold and doing the right thing.”

A challenge is that helping biodiversity doesn’t offer the financial return of carbon storage or timber markets.

Many governments have set standards for reforestation efforts, but they often provide broad leeway.

In Wales, one of the most deforested countries in Europe, the government is offering incentives for tree planting. But growers need only include 25 percent native species to qualify for government subsidies. In Kenya and Brazil, rows of eucalyptus grow on land that was once ecologically rich forest and savanna. In Peru, a company called Reforesta Perú is planting trees on degraded Amazonian land, but it’s increasingly using cloned eucalyptus and teak, intended for export.

Investors prefer them because they bring better prices, said Enrique Toledo, general manager of Reforesta Perú. “They are well-known species internationally and there is an unsatisfied demand for wood.”

When researchers from University College London and the University of Edinburgh evaluated national commitments toward reforestation and restoration, they found that 45 percent involved “planting vast monocultures of trees as profitable enterprises.”

‘The Same Species All Over the World’

When businesses promise to plant a tree for every purchase of a given product, they typically do so via nonprofit groups that work with communities around the world. The support may reforest after wildfires or provide fruit and nut trees to farmers. But even these projects can compromise biodiversity.

The planet is home to nearly 60,000 tree species, and about a third are threatened with extinction — mainly from agriculture, grazing and exploitation — a recent report found. But globally, only a tiny fraction of species are widely planted, according to tree planting groups and scientists.

“They’re planting the same species all over the world,” said Meredith Martin, an assistant professor of forestry at North Carolina State University who found that nonprofit tree planting efforts in the tropics tend to prioritize the livelihood needs of people over biodiversity or carbon storage. Over time, she said, these efforts risk-reducing biodiversity in forests.

Nonprofit tree planting groups often say they plant nonnative species because local communities ask for them. But deeper engagement can yield a different story, said Susan Chomba, who oversees forest restoration and conservation in Africa for the World Resources Institute, a global research nonprofit group. When given the chance to consider what they want to accomplish on their land, farmers will recall, for instance, that when they had more trees, they also had streams, she said. They want the water back.

“Then you say, ‘In your traditional, local knowledge, what kind of tree species are suitable for returning water into the ecosystem?’” Dr. Chomba continued. “They will give you a whole range of indigenous tree species.”

A major hurdle is the lack of supply at local seed banks, which tend to be dominated by popular commercial species. Some groups overcome this problem by paying people to collect seeds from nearby forests.

Another solution, experts say, is to let forests come back on their own. If the area is only lightly degraded or sits near an existing forest, a method called natural regeneration can be cheaper and more effective. Simply fencing off certain areas from grazing will often allow trees to return, with both carbon sequestration and biodiversity built-in.

“Nature knows much more than we do,” Dr. Chazdon said.

Trees have always migrated to survive. But now they need help to avoid climate catastrophe.

I drove to Oregon because I wanted to see the future. Our rapidly changing climate vexes me, keeps me up at night—perhaps you’ve felt this, too—and recently I’d become particularly preoccupied with trees. In California, where I live, climate change helped kill nearly 62 million trees in 2016 alone, and last year, 4.2 million acres of our state burned. I wanted to know what was in store for our forests and, because we humans rely on them for so much—for clean air, for carbon sequestration, for biodiversity, for habitat, for lumber and money, for joy—what was in store for us.

I’d read about a group of scientists who were not only studying the calamities befalling our forests but also working to help the trees migrate in advance of coming doom. So in May, I headed to a 3-and-a-half-acre stand of roughly 1,000 Douglas firs at a US Forest Service nursery outside of Medford. The grove was situated in a wide valley in the southwestern corner of the state, nestled between the Cascades to the east and the Coast Range to the west. Brad St. Clair, a Forest Service scientist who has studied the genetic adaptation of trees for more than two decades, met me by the road. He’s short and rugged as if built for adventuring and tending to the lives of trees, and he arrived in a souped-up Sprinter van loaded with an armory of outdoor gear. In 2009, he and his team planted this and eight other stands of firs after they’d gathered seeds from 60 tree populations all over Washington, Oregon, and California and grown them into seedlings in a greenhouse. The seeds were sourced from as high as 5,400 feet in the Sierras and as low as the coast, from Mendocino County, California, all the way north to Central Washington, and were planted in intermixed clusters at each of the nine sites to see how they would fare in a hotter, drier climate than the ones they’d come from. In other words, to see if they’d make it in the future.

Douglas fir, a tall, narrow-trunked evergreen often dragged indoors for Christmas, is a favorite of foresters and logging companies because of its combination of strength, fast growth, and pliability. It can also withstand a change in climate of about 4 degrees Fahrenheit without much trouble. But global average temperatures have already risen by almost 3 degrees since the 1900s, and all models predict average temperatures to blow through the 4-degree threshold in the next several decades, perhaps rising above 7 degrees by the end of the century.

In the wide, flat expanse of the nursery, the firs were rimmed by fallow land on all sides. St. Clair instructed me to put on safety glasses, and then ducked down, pushed aside the outermost branches, and slipped into the trees. I followed him. Within two steps, there we were in a veritable, dense forest as if an enchanted wardrobe had been pulled open to reveal a world transformed. On the periphery, it had been hot, but here, as we moved through the dapple, it was cool and fragrant with pine.

A sign mounted on a PVC pipe marked the provenance of the cluster of trees we stood beneath. They came, St. Clair explained, from the Oregon Siskiyou, a dry zone at only slightly higher elevation than where we were today. This is why they were doing so well: Their native climate wasn’t so different from Medford’s. As we moved on, the trees, while still lush and full, grew shorter. Because this next batch was from up in the Cascades, he pointed out, at an elevation far higher than where we stood, the trees were somewhat stunted in this new habitat and couldn’t grow as tall. We kept walking, and after a while the trees grew taller again, looming three times my height before breaking into the sky. These trees also came from climates that were dry like Medford, and so found here a happy home—at least for now.

We ducked and trudged through the lower thickets of the healthy trees until we suddenly emerged from the woods onto what I can only describe as an arboreal apocalypse—an open tangle of dead branches, brown and brittle, like an upright graveyard. These ill-fated trees, St. Clair said, had come from the Oregon coast, where it is far wetter. While they’d done okay in the first three years of the study, they just couldn’t make it in the long term. “As the climate warms,” St. Clair said, looking around and pointing up to a dead fir with his walking stick, “you’re going to see more of this.”

The future of forests is a grim one—too grim for some of us to bear. By 2030, 75 percent of redwoods will disappear from some of their coastal California habitats. In some climate scenarios, almost none of the namesake species in Joshua Tree National Park will exist. Sea level change is creating ghost forests all along the Eastern Seaboard—­already, less than a third of New Jersey’s Atlantic white cedar habitat remains.

Like humans, forests have always migrated for their survival, with new trees growing in more hospitable directions and older trees dying where they are no longer best suited to live. The problem now is that they simply can’t move fast enough. The average forest migrates at a rate of roughly 1,640 feet each year, but to outrun climate change, it must move approximately 9,800 to 16,000 feet—up to 10 times as fast. And in most habitats, the impact of highways, suburban sprawl, and megafarms prevent forests from expanding much at all. Forests simply cannot escape climate change by themselves.

Back in 1992, forest geneticists F. Thomas Ledig and J.H. Kitzmiller coined the term “assisted species migration” in a seminal study in the journal Forest Ecology and Management. Since then, hundreds of biologists and geneticists like St. Clair have been studying how best to move forests in advance of their looming destruction. To do so requires a complex set of mapping and experiments—understanding, for instance, what climate trees are best suited to grow in, what region will most closely resemble that same climate in, say, 50 years, and what adaptations best ensure that a tree will take root and flourish, build symbiosis with the soil fungi, and not end up a mere matchstick awaiting the next mega fire.

St. Clair is something of an assisted migration evangelist, a firm believer that we need to move tree populations, and fast if we want to keep apace. But due to bureaucratic logjams and a fervent commitment to planting native species, there’s very little assisted migration in the United States— unlike in Canada, where the practice has been adopted with more urgency in recent years. St. Clair and other Forest Service scientists are working to transform assisted migration from a mere research subject to a standard management strategy in our vast, imperiled public lands.

We finished our walk through St. Clair’s baby forest, making our way back to the cars along its outer edges. “The future is terrifying,” I told him. He understood what I meant, he said.

During the talks he gives about his research, he likes to show an image from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, in which the Red Queen charges forward with her crown and sturdy scepter, pulling frenzied Alice along in her wake. He had the slide printed out and handed it to me as we walked. “Now, here, you see,” the Red Queen says to Alice, “it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”

“So that’s what we gotta do,” he told me, pointing to the Red Queen. “We gotta run.”

While assisted migration is a relatively new concept, the movement of forests is as old as trees themselves. Since they first evolved, trees have been shifting north and south, east and west, up and down in elevation as the climate has changed. Forests outran the frost as an ice age set in, and as the ice began melting, they darted back the other way, traversing mountain ranges and unfurling themselves across continents—moving, sentiently, toward climatic conditions that suited their ability to grow and produce the trees of the future.

Of course, while forests move, individual trees can’t. “They are stuck where they are,” explained Jessica Wright, a senior Forest Service scientist based in Davis, California, who studies conservation genetics. Trees must try to survive in whatever environment they land in. And yet, Peter Wohlleben writes in The Hidden Life of Trees, while every tree has to stay put, “it can reproduce, and in that brief moment when the tree embryos are still packed into seeds, they are free.” The seed sets forth, as Zach St. George chronicles in The Journeys of Trees, carried by the wind or in the belly of a blue jay or stuffed in the cheek of a squirrel, toward its destiny. If it is among the luckiest, it will find a hospitable home and carry the forest forward. Because seeds will only take root in areas suited to their growth, forests tend to move in the direction of their future survival.

Unlike humans, most trees are long-life species, ranging from the yellow birch, which lives roughly 150 years, to the bristlecone pine, the oldest known of which is nearly 5,000 years old. Forests are the trees’ complex civilization, functioning not unlike human cities: a community of beings that talk to one another and organize and defend themselves and create offspring and bid farewell to their dead. In this way and many others, recent research has revealed, trees are spellbinding, rife for anthropomorphism. They tend to live in interdependent networks, like families, where, with the help of symbiotic fungi, scientists like Suzanne Simard have discovered, they care for their sick, feed one another, and, like a mutual aid society, share resources with those in need. Trees of the same species—and sometimes even those across species—tend to respect one another’s personal space, shifting their growth patterns so that everyone gets enough sunlight. Trees are also adept community organizers who know how to band together to crowd out competitor trees and guard against other threats. When a pest comes, trees can issue chemical warnings to one another so they can launch their defenses. Trees can also register pain. Scientists have found that their root networks, which work with the underworld organisms of fungal mycelia, seem to hold intergenerational knowledge, like a collective brain. Read enough about the mesmerizing science of trees and one begins to feel certain that, if humans behaved like a healthy forest, we’d be far better off—and that we wouldn’t be in our current climate mess in the first place.

Left to their own devices, forests migrate on a near-geologic scale. But people have been moving trees for our own purposes for thousands of years. We’ve done this in small doses, such as planting trees in city gardens or backyards for shade and aesthetic delight, or planting a wall of cypress along a tract of farmland to block the wind. We’ve also moved trees on a far more substantial scale, to a range of outcomes. While apple trees originated in Central Asia, early settlers brought seeds to the Americas and infamously scattered them throughout what is now the United States, where apple pie is now both a signature dessert and a cultural symbol.

Such interventions haven’t always panned out so well: In 1895, the emperor of Ethiopia ordered the planting of fast-growing eucalyptus trees imported from Australia so people would have abundant firewood. But the thirsty eucalyptus crowded out existing trees, and parched once-fertile farmlands. (Eucalyptus trees are also invasive transplants in California, though they have also become critical nesting habitat for the threatened monarch butterfly—the web of interconnectivity is a tangled one.) And in 1904, US foresters began planting Japanese chestnuts to cultivate for wood, which brought chestnut blight to their North American cousins ill-equipped to fight the fungus; by 1940, most adult chestnuts were gone. The movement of trees, scientists caution, must be done with extreme care—and based on history, many are hesitant to do it for fear of throwing off the delicate balance of an existing landscape.Three Ways Humans Move Forests»»

Assisted Population Migration Trees or their seeds are moved from one place where they traditionally grow to a new place that’s also within the historical range of their species. Not only is this considered the least risky type of assisted migration; it’s also the one that scientists in the United States and Canada have tested out the most.

Assisted Range Expansion Think of this as sylvan sprawl: To increase the area currently inhabited by a given species, scientists plant it beyond its traditional boundaries—farther than where it would have otherwise naturally lived. Because range expansion introduces new trees to places they’ve never lived, there is some risk of disturbing the balance of the new habitat.

Assisted Species Migration Species are transported from their native habitat to regions where they’ve never lived—or haven’t for millennia. The risk here is substantial: These invasive species could weaken or wipe out native ones, but it might be the only chance for trees in critical need of a lifeboat.

Illustrations by Brown Bird Design

Proponents of assisted migration claim that this balance has already been upended by climate change. They also stress that assisted migration is an umbrella term for a range of activities, some way more far-reaching than others. The most drastic intervention is known as assisted species migration, which transplants species of trees from places where they naturally occur to faraway places where they do not. Then there’s assisted range expansion, which plants trees slightly outside their naturally occurring territory. The strategy involving the least human intervention is known as assisted population migration, which, like St. Clair’s studies of Douglas fir, plants trees of a single species with certain adaptations to a new location where other members of that same species already live. Most scientists advocate the latter two strategies and consider the first one too extreme.

So how to safely move a population to a new habitat—and to know how far to do it, and how fast? “If I knew the answer to that,” Forest Service scientist Kas Dumroese told me, “I’d have the Nobel Prize.” To find out which plants are best suited to which environments, scientists tend to use something called the Common Garden Study, which, like the artificial forest I visited in Oregon, plants flora from a wide range of locations—and thus adapted to a range of conditions—on a single plot to study their response and growth patterns. What scientists have found in most assisted migration garden studies is that the trees that do best are those whose parents and ancestors thrived in similar terrain.

If you move a population of trees adapted to a particular climate too slowly, it’s bound to succumb to the hotter, drier conditions brought on by climate change. But move it too fast to a colder, wetter climate, and the trees might fall victim to too much frost, or to root rot in damp conditions that make them vulnerable to pests. Shifting trees that can handle midcentury climate projections—so new forests are adapted to the temperatures of roughly 2040 to 2070—seems to be the Goldilocks balance that will ensure a population’s survival.

But there are other important considerations, including the symbiotic relationship between soil fungi and trees. Simard, the author of the recent bestselling book Finding the Mother Tree, explains that, while trees will likely find some symbiotic mycelium as long as they are moved within their species’ existing range, that mycelium might not be the best adapted for their needs. Trees can’t be seen as growing in isolation, but need to be considered in terms of the overall health and relationships of a larger ecosystem. “There’s a lot we don’t know,” she told me. Assisted migration “is risky, but, you know, we also have no choice. We have to start experimenting with this. We have to start moving things around and watching and seeing how they do.”

The Forest Service scientists who study assisted migration couldn’t agree more, and they hope that the agency’s forest managers will start using this strategy in actual forests. Despite decades of research, the Forest Service has rarely put assisted migration into practice, in part due to some foresters’ and scientists’ resistance to moving trees outside their agreed-upon range. In the 1930s, the Forest Service created the idea of seed zones—mapping the landscape into areas “within which plant materials can be transferred with little risk of being poorly adapted to their new location,” as the agency states on its website. Ever since, forest managers have stayed loyal to these zones when selecting seeds for planting.

While assisted migration isn’t strictly prohibited by the Forest Service Manual and its accompanying handbooks—the official policy documents that, as Forest Service land manager Andy Bower explains, guide “every aspect” of how the agency operates—it isn’t encouraged, either. Last fall, Bower, St. Clair, and five other forest geneticists in the Forest Service proposed changes to the manual that include assisted population migration and, in some cases, slight range expansion, as forestry strategies. If their recommendations are accepted, it could drastically accelerate the use of assisted migration nationwide.

The Forest Service doesn’t have to look far for an example of a country taking a more aggressive tack: Canada is substantially ahead of the United States in research and implementation of assisted migration. This is, in part, a result of urgency. In the early aughts, aided by worsening climate change, lodgepole pine forests were devastated by invasive bark beetles and massive wildfires. This was also true in the United States, but when it happened in Canada, the country acted far more aggressively. “It was huge,” Greg O’Neill, a scientist working for the Canadian Forest Service, told me, “like they got hit by a sledgehammer. It really woke up the forestry community.” The Forest Service of British Columbia launched the Assisted Migration Adaptation Trial, or AMAT, in 2009, planting roughly 153,000 trees to see how each would fare in different climates. With more than a decade of results, they have begun to use this data to reforest areas that have been logged or burned.

This is not to say that the method should become the land management strategy in all or even most scenarios. Moving species across a landscape in response to climate change, Dumroese says, should be undertaken according to the Hippocratic Oath. “We’re talking about making some decisions that have some implications that we may not understand or even be recognized for 100 years,” he said, “or even longer.”

One of the troubles with assisted migration is that it’s difficult to know what future climate to plan for. Human choices are hard to predict. The adoption of a Green New Deal, for instance, would significantly affect climate modeling, as would the reelection of Donald Trump in 2024 or the continued reign of Amazon-destroying Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil.

But even in the most optimistic of climate scenarios, the forests need to get moving, from south to north, from lowlands to highlands, so that our landscapes remain populated with trees.

“It’s almost like we have this temporal-­centric view of nature,” O’Neill said. “A lot of people view climate change as something that’s going to happen, not something that has already happened.” And though all trees can generally survive a change of 4 degrees Fahrenheit in either direction, O’Neill reminds me that 2.7 degrees—the amount that the climate has already warmed in the past century—is a cataclysmic change of circumstances from a tree’s perspective. Seen this way, he said, “these trees are already a long way from home.” If all we do is help them get back to the kinds of habitats they’d lived in before the climate began to change so rapidly, he added, “I think we’ll be doing a great service.”

In May, a few weeks before driving to Oregon, I accompanied Forest Service scientist Jessica Wright from her research station in the Sierra Nevada foothills up Route 50 and into the mountains of the Eldorado National Forest, one of the most ecologically diverse tracts of land in California, spanning nearly 1 million acres. The road wound us upward into the rolling expanse of the Sierras, where towering green pines spread in all directions. Such sights always reminded me of the state’s largesse, and I used to find them transcendental: the sanctity of open space, the vastness of the landscape a mirror for the vastness of the human spirit. But now, this feeling is accompanied by a twin coil of fear. Fire. Those trees are exquisite fuel, and it all feels doomed to burn.

We turned onto a dirt road and knocked our way through the forest. After a few minutes, the trees thinned; the lowest branches of ponderosa pines and Douglas firs were charred, and the blackened sticks of former trees pointed skyward like bayonets. The road took us to an open clearing, bare and treeless like a wound. This was the site of the King Fire, which destroyed roughly 250 square miles of the central Sierra foothills in 2014, and it was only now, seven years later, looking green again.

A few years back, Wright started talking to a Forest Service program manager named Dana Walsh about the prospect of an assisted migration research trial on a tract of land that Walsh oversaw—and they decided to plant along this 12-acre patch that had burned. In the winter of 2019, they sowed their 1,200 trees sourced from 24 origin populations. Their hope is to convince other forest managers that assisted migration can be used to replant burned forests in the future—instead of reforesting strictly with local seeds. And several Forest Service scientists, including Wright and St. Clair, are building new seed selection databases that map climate predictions with seed source adaptations, should assisted migration finally be put into practice in the States.

Wright, who has hip-length hair and seems equally at home sporting a hard hat and presenting at a conference, is particularly optimistic about the prospects of planting in burn zones. If a forest will be replanted anyway, why plant what was already there and burned, when we can reforest these burn sites—which have grown all the more common, and so much bigger—with trees that will be better suited to that future in 30 to 50 years? A stressed forest brings diseases and pests, which kill trees, offering more kindling to burn. The healthier a forest, the less likely it is to catch fire.

Assisted migration “is risky, but, you know, we also have no choice.

We have to start experimenting with this.

We have to start moving things around and watching and seeing how they do.”

Burn zones, like this one seen from a drone in California’s Shasta-Trinity National Forest, offer a unique opportunity to create the forests of the future. As assisted migration has gained more traction, researchers believe burn zones are prime spots to plant trees that will be adapted for the warmer climates of the middle of the century—and beyond.

Along 12 acres of the King Fire site, Wright and her team had planted two kinds of pine: ponderosa—which grow up to 200 feet tall with thick, striated bark—and a type of sugar pine resistant to white pine blister rust, a fungus decimating western sugar pines. To mimic nature, the trees had been planted somewhat willy-nilly along the hillside, as they would grow in the wild. We walked along the planting site, where I tried to spot the trees; at only two years old, the saplings were not much higher than my ankle. Some hadn’t made it at all, and some were still slight wisps of life, while others were growing strong and burly.

I asked Wright what she made of the differences in growth. She laughed.

“It’s too early to say,” Wright told me.

But weren’t they impatient, I wanted to know? I was. Why was this tree, on the lower slope, doing so beautifully, its tiny trunk much thicker than the rest, its needles skewering outward like porcupine quills, its yellow-green buds promising new growth?

Wright countered that it’s not until about 10 years into a study that the data starts to be meaningful. “That’s when I start to believe it,” she said. So many things could happen between now and then, and early growth might not end up meaning much. After all, those dead Douglas firs that had so rattled me in Oregon had done great the first few years of the study.

We found some shade under the trees that had survived the 2014 fire, and sat down for lunch. To consider the future of forests is to slip into a timeline so abstract that it’s hard to conceive, but scientists like Wright are in it for the long haul, imagining a lifespan far beyond their own.

“I won’t see this big tall forest we’re planting now,” she said. Her kid might see it, or perhaps her grandkid. Tending to any kind of future is a gesture of optimism, she concedes, particularly such a distant one. “But I’m good with that.”

As a member of the living, it can be difficult to understand how unlikely it is, statistically speaking, to become alive. A healthy beech tree, explains Wohlleben in The Hidden Life of Trees, will produce roughly 1.8 million beechnuts in its lifetime. “From these, exactly one will develop into a full-grown tree,” he writes, “and in forest terms, that is a high rate of success, similar to winning the lottery.”

For Joshua trees, the odds of successful reproduction are even longer. For a Joshua tree to be born—a tree that lives in far starker conditions than the beech—its mother has to flower and seed when it reaches sexual maturity. The seed, which resembles a flat puck of black putty smaller than a dime, has to find a home conducive to its germination and bloom. That’s hard enough in the dry expanse of the desert, and harder still as the landscape warms. Its best-case scenario is to find its way to a spot beneath a nurse shrub or blackbrush, where it can germinate protected from the chomp of roving jackrabbits. It would particularly benefit from finding a spot atop a symbiotic soil fungus that lurks beneath the sandy loam and can help the baby Joshua tree grow. If the tree makes it past the perils of early life, it needs another 30 to 60 years before it’s ready to reproduce. Then it would rely on the yucca moth to pollinate it; otherwise, it won’t bear fruit. Then and only then, after this confounding and unlikely gauntlet has been run, will a Joshua tree be able to set seed, the whole tenuous cycle repeating itself.

Scientists have mapped Joshua tree survival against the most dire climatic conditions—i.e., if humans continue at our current rate of consumption and emission—and found that by the year 2100, essentially zero Joshua tree habitat will remain in California’s Joshua Tree National Park, even for trees that are already among the most drought-tolerant.

Lynn Sweet, a plant ecologist who studies Joshua trees at the University of California, Riverside, told me that her team calculated that, under more mitigated scenarios in which carbon emissions were reduced, “we could preserve up to 20 percent or so of habitat in the park and the surroundings,” assuming the moth and mycelium make it in this scenario, too.

When it comes to conservation efforts, humans most often think of the forests most dear to them—the places they grew up visiting, the places where they got married or take their beloved weekend hikes, the national parks known for their iconic trees. These places—Sequoia National Park, Olympic, Muir Woods, the Everglades—loom large in our collective consciousness. “I often joke with reporters,” Sweet told me, “that no one is coming out to do a climate change article on the blackbrush bush,” an equally imperiled species in the desert.

Joshua Tree National Park is central on my personal map of sacred places. It was the first place I went backpacking as a kid, the first place I slept under the stars, and a place I’ve returned to again and again to reattune with the world. The Joshua tree’s silhouette is imprinted on many significant memories throughout my life—these are trees I really, really, really want to survive.

After getting vaccinated last spring, I headed down for a few days in search of desert light and those fabled trees. I drove from the south end of Joshua Tree to the north, moving through a low, flat valley where Joshua trees and cholla clustered in mighty, baffling stands. The Joshua trees here in the valley looked healthy enough, but botanists know better: Look closely, they told me, and you’ll see there are no young sprouting among the noble elders. This was a forest of childless parents, living their final days as the last of their kind to call that spot their home.

Sweet had directed me to visit Black Rock Canyon, where the healthiest of Joshua trees were now finding space to grow. Here we were at a higher elevation than the park’s sweeping flatlands, meaning it was cooler and slightly wetter. “They’re essentially running uphill,” she told me, on an intergenerational march toward higher ground. I took a long solo hike through these highlands where hundreds of Joshuas stood. The trees were lovely to behold from all angles, like benevolent apparitions from some absurdist underworld. But the best view was from above: beholding all those Joshua trees across the valley floor that were thriving, surrounded by their young, with room still to move upward. The problem with up is there’s only so far to go before it’s just sky.

The living will do whatever they need to survive. In the apocalyptic grove near Medford, I had seen one desiccated former tree whose branches were covered in hundreds of cones still affixed to it like Christmas ornaments. St. Clair explained that this behavior was normal enough for a tree in distress. Sensing it will die, the tree bursts forth into cones in a frantic final act of hope: not so much for itself, but for its species.

I left the desert like I’d left Oregon, having seen what I’d come to see: the future. There wasn’t a single version of it, but many. Another quote St. Clair likes to share is by the late forester and politician Gifford Pinchot: “The vast possibilities of our great future will become realities only if we make ourselves responsible for that future.” If we look into the crystal ball, we see ourselves peering back at us in search of answers to the same questions.

The paper
T. Qiu et al., “Is there tree senescence? The fecundity evidence,” PNAS, doi:10.1073/pnas.2106130118, 2021.

According to Duke University ecologist James Clark, many researchers think that, given the right conditions, trees can generally continue to grow for a very long time, producing more seeds all the while. But the common agricultural practice of replacing fruit and nut trees every few decades to avoid declining yields belies this dogma, he points out. “Nobody who’s trying to produce seeds or nuts for a profession would rip out their trees and plant new ones if they didn’t have to.”

To get to the root of this apparent contradiction, Clark and a team of more than 60 researchers from 12 countries embarked on a massive undertaking: analyzing a long-term plant monitoring database to analyze the relationship between tree size (which they used as a proxy for age) and seed production in more than half a million trees representing nearly 600 species.

The researchers found that although seed output, or fecundity, initially increased dramatically with tree size across all species, there was a point where fecundity started to decline in 63 percent of the species they studied, while in another 17 percent, the rate of fecundity instead plateaued at a certain size. In the remaining 20 percent, there appeared to be no negative effect of tree size on fecundity, although the authors note this could have been due to the difficulty in finding larger members of those species. 

Because the team didn’t have access to data on tree age, it’s impossible to know whether the observed decrease in fecundity was due to aging or to some other aspect of their large size, says plant physiologist Sergi Munné-Bosch at the University of Barcelona, who was not involved with the study. Nevertheless, “it’s amazing to collect such huge amounts of data,” he says, adding that “having almost 600 species is a treasure.” 

In the fall of 2022, Henrico County Public School (HCPS) students will make nature their classroom – on land protected by Capital Region Land Conservancy (CRLC).

MARCH 2, 2022 PRESS RELEASE from Capital Region Land Conservancy

RICHMOND, VA – In the fall of 2022, Henrico County Public School (HCPS) students will make nature their classroom – on land protected by Capital Region Land Conservancy (CRLC). The School District announced the establishment of a new Center for Environmental Science and Sustainability anchored at Varina High School at a School Board meeting in August and entered into a memorandum of understanding with CRLC. Applications for the new program were accepted until January 10th.

The Center will provide students with a unique opportunity to expand their understanding of environmental stewardship through student-centered learning, community partnerships, and foundational academic knowledge. The goals of the new Center are to utilize the broader community as a context for learning, encourage interdisciplinary instruction, incorporate experiential learning that fosters collaborative, creative, and critical thinking skills, implement environmental service-learning projects, and to allow students to earn college credits and credentials. As one of several sites where students will have outdoor access, CRLC’s recently acquired 353 acres near Deep Bottom and Four Mile Creek will provide an environmentally and historically rich location with abundant opportunities for experiential and place-based learning.

“The innovative learning opportunities created by this partnership are boundless. CRLC’s property offers a rich landscape for hands-on learning about sustainability, environmental science, and stewardship,” said Amy Cashwell, Superintendent of Henrico County Public Schools. “We are fortunate to have a visionary school board, board of supervisors, and community partners who understand and embrace the immense possibilities when learning extends beyond the traditional classroom.”

CRLC Land Holdings LLC, a single-member, wholly-owned subsidiary of Capital Region Land Conservancy, received the Deep Bottom property in May 2021 as the result of a generous donation from the prior landowner, Randy Welch. The conservation easements protecting the property, recorded in 2017 and 2018, will remain enforced. The property boasts over 400 feet of frontage along the James River, 1.3 miles along Four Mile Creek, 3,700 feet along Roundabout Creek, and contains more than 75 acres of wetlands and riparian buffer within a resource protection zone. The land contains 173 acres of prime farmland and 57 acres of soils of statewide significance. Deep Bottom’s historical significance is equally impressive. There are documented historic resources associated with the Battles of First Deep Bottom, Second Deep Bottom, and New Market Heights in which the U.S. Colored Troops fought. With all these values protected, CRLC’s land makes for a perfect campus to explore many of the great natural and historic resources of eastern Henrico County.

“While the property was already protected by conservation easements, taking ownership of it affords us a greater opportunity to enhance connections to the land through meaningful, site-specific immersive learning for our youth and the general public,” said Parker C. Agelasto, CRLC’s Executive Director.

Since August, CRLC has convened HCPS representatives along with representatives of Henrico Education Foundation, Henricopolis Soil & Water Conservation District, James River Association, National Park Service, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond Audubon Society, Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation, Virginia Department of Forestry to begin envisioning the possible educational uses of the property. Funding provided through the Upper and Middle James Riparian Consortium ($10,000) as well as the James River Buffer Program of the Virginia Department of Forestry ($22,000) has allowed CRLC to initiate the restoration of 9 acres of important forest buffer which will enhance water quality and habitat. Students could study these improvements in water quality, forest succession, native grass propagation, migratory bird breeding and stopover habitat, and more. These educational opportunities support the center’s goal for an integrated interdisciplinary approach to science, technology, and history.

“It feels good knowing that our work will enhance the riparian forest around the streams and river on the Deep Bottom property and will contribute to CRLC’s goals for nature-based education, especially around the role of trees in water quality protection,” said Deya Ramsden, Middle James River Forest Watershed Project Coordinator for the Virginia Department of Forestry.

In addition to the work of the Advisory Group to support the educational initiatives of the new Center for Environmental Science and Sustainability anchored at Varina High School, CRLC is working on a land management plan for the property. Funding for the plan is provided in part by a $23,000 grant from the Chesapeake Bay Restoration Fund, a fund generated from the sale of Chesapeake Bay license plates at the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles. The plan for the property will include the interpretation of the property’s historic resources, maintaining and/or improving the ecological health of the plant communities found there, and providing for quality recreational opportunities for the public that also educates them regarding the history and ecology of the site. The plan will promote healthy ecosystems and clean water mitigating threats to the various sensitive features of the property. For example, the entire 353 acres fall within the National Audubon Society’s Lower James River Important Bird Area and with the right management, goals can support many migratory species. Future public access for outdoor recreation may include camping, hiking, bird watching, orienteering, geocaching, and other potential uses which are compatible with ecological goals.

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About Capital Region Land Conservancy (CRLC): Incorporated in March 2005 as a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, CRLC seeks to conserve and protect the natural and historic land and water resources of Virginia’s Capital Region for the benefit of current and future generations. CRLC is the only non-profit organization devoted specifically to the conservation of land within the capital region serving the City of Richmond and the Counties of Charles City, Chesterfield, Goochland, Hanover, Henrico, New Kent, and Powhatan. CRLC educates landowners about voluntary land protection tools, facilitates the process of donating conservation easements, and holds or co-holds conservation easements. CRLC is accredited by the Land Trust Accreditation Commission, an independent program of the Land Trust Alliance. CRLC has helped protect more than 13,000 acres that includes fee simple ownership of 460 acres as well as easements on more than 2,300 acres.

For more information: Contact Parker C. Agelasto, Executive Director parker@capitalregionland.org

By Alejandra Martins 22nd February 2022

Mexico has more species of oak trees than any other country. In recent years, the saplings of one of its most vulnerable and well-loved oak species have disappeared.

By the banks of a seasonal riverbed in north-western Mexico, a collection of towering, gnarled oak trees stand guard. These trees descend from ancestors that lived more than 50 million years ago and their species has faced, and survived, any number of challenges.

Today fewer than 5,000 of them are still standing, and they are found only in the Sierra La Laguna mountains, in the state of Baja California Sur. These trees, at the tip of the Baja California peninsula, are the last living populations of Quercus brandegeei, a species of oak known locally as “encino arroyero” (stream oak) due to its restricted habitat along the banks of streams.

“They are survivors, those trees are heroes,” says Silvia Álvarez Clare, a Costa Rican ecologist who is the director of the Global Tree Program of the Morton Arboretum, a botanical garden and conservation center in Illinois.

Mexico is home to more species of oak than any country in the world, though many of them are threatened. In the case of the arroyo oak, as it is known, the species now faces a particularly troubling problem. Though plenty of trees aged more than 100 years can be found, locals noticed that in recent years there had been no seedlings that have sprouted from their acorns in sight. For some reason, the trees had simply stopped reproducing.

The arroyo oak likely had a much wider range in the past but is now restricted to a small pocket of Mexico (Credit: The Morton Arboretum)

Álvarez Clare describes the trees as “a community of arroyo oak pensioners, because we haven’t been able to find juveniles. And in a healthy population of trees there are a lot of young individuals”.

Mexican and US scientists, alongside local communities, are now seeking not only to solve this mystery of the missing stream oak saplings but to save this iconic species from extinction.

Global but vulnerable

“It is estimated that there are between 400 and 600 species of oaks in the world,” explains Maricela Rodríguez, a Mexican botanist specializing in oaks and the coordinator for Mexico and Central America of the Global Consortium for the Conservation of Oaks (GCCO).

Some scientists conservatively estimate there to be “a figure of 435 species, of which 168 are found in Mexico”, says Rodríguez. “In other words, 38% of the total are found in this part of the world. Other regions with high oak species richness are South East Asia, which is home to 140 species, and the United States with 91 species.”

The Red List of Oaks 2020, a study published by the Morton Arboretum and the Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI), indicates that at least one-third of oak species are endangered. And for about another 105 species, there is not enough information to tell how the population is doing.

Arroyo oaks provide rare shade in hot weather, but this can lead to its own problems for the trees’ acorns (Credit: The Morton Arboretum)

“I find it incredible. They are such rare, new [to science] or unknown species that we don’t even know if they are threatened or not,” says Álvarez Clare.

In the case of Mexico, the Red List estimates that 32 of the country’s oak species are in danger of extinction. And among the most threatened is the arroyo oak.

A haven in Mexico

Part of the puzzle lies in the species’ limited range, far from its evolutionary relatives. The most closely related species to the stream oak is Quercus fusiformis, which is found in Texas, Oklahoma and north-east Mexico says botanist Allen Coombes, who curates scientific collections at the Botanic Garden of the University of Puebla in Mexico.

So how did the stream oak come to survive only at the tip of the Baja California peninsula?

“Since its appearance about 55 million years ago, in the late Paleocene, the genus Quercus has survived many biological and physical changes,” says Rodríguez. “Since then, climatic changes have caused population movements, expansions, and decreases in their distribution, both latitudinally and altitudinally.”

The arroyo oak probably had a wider distribution in the past, and found a haven in the Sierra La Laguna, says Mexican ecologist Aurora Breceda from the Centre for Biological Research of the Northwest (Cibnor). “Everything indicates that it is a relict species,” she says, referring to species that survive only in small populations, serving as remnants of the past.

“There is only that relic of the historical distribution of the arroyo oak that we calculate must have a total of less than 5,000 individuals, very restricted to only the banks of the streams,” says Álvarez Clare.

Local people have helped revive the arroyo by planting, caring for, and “adopting” seedlings (Credit: The Morton Arboretum)

Scientists believe that the species failed to adapt to changes that, over millions of years, created a near-desert climate in this region. Today, the habitat is so dry that many streams are only filled with water by winter rains or hurricanes that create powerful but ephemeral currents.

It is only in the humidity of sandy soil on the banks of the streams of the Sierra La Laguna, that the arroyo oak found its refuge.

An oasis and a resource

Quercus brandegeei is considered a key species for the ecosystem and is highly valued by the local population.

The arroyo oaks “are beautiful”, says Breceda. “Here in Baja California Sur, an area with scarce vegetation cover, you have these huge trees.

“An arroyo oak can measure 20m [66ft] in height and have crowns of 30sq m [320sq ft]. They are like a peaceful oasis.”

Most of these scattered oak populations are found within a range of 3,000sq km (1,200sq miles), most inside the perimeter of the Sierra La Laguna Biosphere Reserve. Biosphere reserves are natural spaces identified by Unesco – the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization – where biological conservation coexists with the cultural and economic development of local people. The arroyo oak survives here alongside humans and their cattle, which are allowed to roam the area freely.

Many locals report having lived with this species for generations. “I remember my grandmother who used the acorns to make oil, tortillas,” says Rogelio Rosas López, owner of a local tour agency, Rancho Ecológico El Refugio. His grandmother, he recalls, also cooked with the seeds “atole”, a typical Mexican pudding. “And she used to take us and pinch us because we had to gather sacks of acorns to give to the pigs.”

Livestock such as pigs have shared the landscape with the arroyo oak for generations (Credit: The Morton Arboretum)

The acorns of the stream oak are food for pigs and goats, as well as wild animals. Occasionally, if there is a fallen tree, the wood is used.

“A lot would be lost for the ecosystem if the oaks weren’t there, mainly the shade. We wouldn’t enjoy such a beautiful landscape,” says Juan Refugio Manríquez Rosas, another member of the community. “People would lose the best acorns, and everything from birds to raccoons and squirrels would be affected.” The honey from this oak, too, is highly valued and has become a source of local income, he adds.

The missing saplings

No one knows exactly how old the arroyo oaks of the Sierra La Laguna are. “It really is a great mystery. We think they are definitely over a hundred years old. But it could be that they are hundreds of years old,” said Álvarez Clare. In 2022, a team of experts in dendrochronology, the science of dating trees, is expected to find a conclusive answer to the question.

But the biggest puzzle is the absence of juveniles, something that has long drawn the attention of local inhabitants.

“My grandfather used to say that there were many more trees,” said José Abelino Cota, owner of a plot of land in the Sierra La Laguna. “It is very rare to see a new tree. I don’t know what is the reason for it.”

Explaining this lack of regeneration is vital. Although oaks can sometimes reproduce asexually, producing underground stems with shoots that give rise to new individuals, this form of reproduction does not protect the future of the species. It only creates clones of the same tree, without the genetic variability necessary to respond to drastic environmental changes or new diseases.

Only sexual reproduction, with small trees born from acorns, is likely to maintain the arroyo oak in the long run.

Looking for answers

Scientists explored various hypotheses to explain the lack of regeneration. The first was the impact of climate change, which, according to Álvarez Clare, has caused “the dry season to be drier and hotter, and the rains to be more unpredictable in this area of ​​Baja California Sur”.

The second hypothesis was the lack of viability of the acorns – but a study at Cibnor showed the opposite. “We collected seeds from several locations. At Cibnor we measured them, did a morphological study, and put them to germinate. And they have a very high germination rate – more than 90% germinate,” says Breceda.

The acorns of the arroyo oak had no trouble in germinating, researchers found – the limitations to the oak’s regeneration must lie elsewhere (Credit: The Morton Arboretum)

The third hypothesis, according to the Morton Arboretum’s Álvarez Clare, was the conflict with the ranchers’ cattle. “We think the cows are definitely a problem for the oak because they love to be in the shade and they crush the seedlings,” she says. “And besides, the pigs eat the acorns.”

For Álvarez Clare, the mystery of the stream oak’s lack of regeneration continues and “has only been partially solved”. Scientists agree on the impact of livestock crushing and eating acorns, but the consequences of climate change raise further questions. “Climate change is indeed a problem, but how much and to what magnitude is something we are still not sure about,” she says.

For Breceda, the big problem could be the changes in the temporary patterns of both rainfall and temperatures. “We really don’t know if the effects of climate change could be causing variations in these seasonal patterns, which could be affecting the species. We don’t know, a separate study is required.”

‘Let’s Save the Arroyo Oak’

Although the precise impact of climate change on the germination of acorns is unknown, there is one thing that the project’s experts are certain about: the way to save these oaks lies in the hands of the community members themselves.

“The ranchers have a double function: they are part of the problem, but they are our only solution if we want to save the arroyo oak,” says Álvarez Clare.

The scientists’ response has been to establish a tree care and adoption program with ranchers and other residents called Salvemos al Encino Arroyero, or “Let’s save the Arroyo Oak”. The project is part of the Global Trees Campaign, an initiative to save the world’s threatened trees coordinated by the BGCI.

The idea is that local people plant, care for, and “adopt” seedlings, becoming guardians of the species, says Mexican biologist and researcher Daniel Wblesther Pérez Morales, who leads the work with the communities, explains. The residents will in turn benefit from the acorns and the many other services that these trees provide.

“We established a community nursery and propagated seedlings to plant new arroyo oak trees in the region,” says Pérez Morales. It’s important that collected acorns are planted, as the seeds of the stream oak do not tolerate being dehydrated. So far, close to 500 new trees have been planted with the help of the inhabitants of the communities.

Researchers like Silvia Alvarez Clare have worked to collect arroyo acorns before they are devoured by pigs (Credit: The Morton Arboretum)

“We plan to plant about 1,200 new oaks in the region. We will plant within the fences of the ranches to ensure that each oak is growing protected and well cared for,” says Pérez Morales.

“We will also plant outside the ranches in areas where there is less pressure from predators. And with the help of the municipal authorities, we will plant in public spaces, where each planted tree has protection, care, and its growth can be monitored.”

The Morton Arboretum and the GCCO are also working with botanic gardens in Mexico to establish the oak elsewhere beyond its current range, to improve the chances for conservation of the species. Currently, 15 trees are growing in the botanic garden of the University of Puebla in central Mexico.

An exchange of knowledge

Scientists, local authorities, ranchers, and other members of the community in the town of San Dionisio in Baja California Sur came together to discuss the oak’s future at a workshop on the initiative in late 2021. “It was a workshop where we co-constructed knowledge,” says Breceda. “Because it’s not like ‘wise’ scientists are going to tell local people what to do with something that has been theirs for hundreds of years. They grew up with these trees.”

Local people know better than anyone the best places to plant, says Pérez Morales. And they know that without their help, in an increasingly dry and unpredictable climate, it will be very difficult for the oak to survive.

“It is important that we ranchers give ourselves the task of taking care of these spaces, of watering the trees until they are at least two years old,” says Rogelio Rosas López.

More workshops are planned in 2022, as well as the first “Festival of the Arroyo Oak” in San Dionisio. The idea is also to promote other activities that are a source of income, including ecotourism and artisan products such as mango jelly or a drink from damiana, a local plant.

Clinging to life

The stream oak project shows how complex, and case-by-case, the task of saving endangered species is.

“The work has not been easy since the results of these efforts are not immediate and it must be understood that they will be seen over longer periods. However, we are on the right track,” says Pérez Morales.

Noelia Álvarez de Román, director of conservation for Latin America and the Caribbean of the BGCI, has praised the outcomes so far. “The Quercus brandegeei conservation project has resulted in important advances in knowledge of the species and its threats, in the dissemination of the importance of its conservation, and in the increase of capacities of local collaborators,” she says.

“If this species disappears, it disappears from the face of the known universe,” says Cibnor’s Aurora Breceda. “And on the other hand, we lose the possibility of sustainable resources for the rural populations of Baja California Sur, for which I have enormous respect and admiration.”

The Morton Arboretum’s Álvarez Clare never ceases to be amazed that “currents, storms, hurricanes, droughts happen to these oaks and they are still clinging there, producing their acorns, providing shade, cleaning the air, giving life”.

“Actually, when I’m next to one of those trees, I just touch the trunk and say, ‘thank you!’.

“The arroyo oaks have been there much longer than we have,” says Álvarez Clare. “And we want to ensure that they are there for our children and our grandchildren, that they can have the shade of that wonderful tree that our grandparents had.”

—

Alejandra Martins is a broadcast journalist at BBC Mundo. This article was originally published in Spanish on BBC Mundo – you can read it here.

There’s been nothing like these cyclone seasons for at least several centuries.

K. E. D. COAN

Tropical cyclones like Hurricane Ida can cause severe flooding, producing disruptions, damage, and loss of life. Like many other types of weather, tropical cyclones and hurricanes on the US East Coast have become more extreme over the past several decades. Although there is some controversy over the extent of the increase in intensity, there is evidence that such storms are moving more slowly than in the past. This slower movement causes storms to last longer and produce more rain. However, because conventional weather records only go as far back as 1948, it’s unclear how unusual these slow-moving cyclones are compared to earlier weather patterns. 

A recent study addresses this question by using tree rings to reconstruct hundreds of years of seasonal cyclone precipitation levels. The studied trees, some over 300 years old, show that precipitation extremes have been increasing by 2 to 4 mm per decade, resulting in a cumulative increase in rainfall of as much as 128 mm (five inches) compared to the early 1700s. The greatest increases have occurred in the last 60 years, and recent extremes are unmatched by any prior events. 

Beyond establishing these reconstructed historical records, researchers are working with these data sets to improve forecasts of what this region might expect in the future. 

Good for growth—at least for trees

In earlier work, Dr. Justin Maxwell and his collaborators found that longleaf pine trees on the East Coast of the US could act as indicators of tropical cyclone precipitation, as measured by the trees’ late season (June to October) growth bands. These smaller, more local studies indicated that recent precipitation levels were far greater than anything the trees had experienced earlier in their lifetimes. 

That’s an unexpected finding since tree-ring records generally show evidence of extreme weather scattered throughout their history, although the frequency may vary. The discovery prompted a new study, which checked whether this pattern held over a wider area.

“Often, tree-ring reconstructions show us that the extreme climate we have recorded with instruments (weather stations) over the last 120 years was surpassed back in time,” Dr. Justin Maxwell told Ars Technica. “Our past research showed that recent extremes were unmatched in the past—all the highest values are mostly since the 1990s, which was a big surprise, and that encouraged us to sample a broader area to see if this increase was local or present over a larger region.”Advertisement

Combining existing data sets with two new locations, the researchers included trees from a total of seven sites across North and South Carolina. Within North America, this region receives the most rain from tropical cyclones, and it also has the world’s most complete record of this type of precipitation. 

The new data sets included a selection of samples from 13–36 old-growth trees per site (taken in a way that caused minimal damage to the trees), as well as stumps. The researchers’ next step was to calibrate their model by comparing tree ring patterns to known rainfall measurements from 1948 to the present. 

Reconstructing the past to predict the future

As might be expected, tree rings are more representative of seasonal rainfall than of the frequency or extremity of individual storms. But the growth patterns clearly suggested less cyclone season precipitation in centuries gone by. 

A year with a lot of rain doesn’t necessarily mean a giant storm passed through. “[It] could represent rainfall from one hurricane, or it could’ve been multiple hurricanes,” wrote Maxwell. “What we found in this paper is that this area is receiving more tropical cyclone precipitation for the entire season.” While researchers in the field are still debating the cause, many have suggested that it’s related to the trend of storms moving over the area more slowly. 

Worldwide, cyclones’ translational speeds have decreased by as much as 10 percent in the last 70 years due to weakening global wind currents. “This [increased precipitation] is because hurricanes are hanging around one area longer than they used to,” Maxwell explained.

The team is expanding its historical reconstruction by including samples from across the southeastern US. The study’s co-author, Dr. Joshua Bregy, is also collaborating with other experts to explore whether these reconstructions can be used to help project what we might expect from future cyclone seasons. 

“Based on our current knowledge of the global climate system, in a warmer world, global winds will be weaker, and we are seeing this happen already,” said Maxwell. “If warming continues, as is predicted, these global winds will continue to be weak. Global winds are what steer tropical cyclones, so having weaker winds leads to more meandering storm tracks and stalled storms in one location, producing more rainfall. Therefore, these large seasonal totals of tropical cyclones are likely to continue into the future.” 

PNAS, 2021. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2105636118

K.E.D. Coan is a freelance journalist covering climate and environment stories at Ars Technica. She has a Ph.D. in chemistry and chemical biology.

By: Christie Wilcox

Whole-genome sequences reveal multiple domestications of this agriculturally important tree and may hold the secrets to producing the sweet fruit year-round.

If you happen to be in the Fujian province of China and know the right people, you could have the opportunity to see the oldest living lychee tree—a Songxiang variety that most likely first sprouted more than 1,250 years ago during the Tang dynasty. That was around the time Emperor Xuanzong created a relay of sprinting horses to race the quick-spoiling fruit 700 kilometers from where it was grown to the capital in a week to ensure his beloved consort Yang Guifei had her fill of fresh lychee throughout its short fruiting season.

If it also happens to be June or July and you’re really lucky, you might even taste the ancient tree’s fruit, because even after a millennium, the plant continues to bear the sweet lychee that made its species a major agricultural crop in the region.

Chinese artist Ding Fuzhi’s 1941 painting of lychees with a poem about Emperor Xuanzong’s imperial lychee delivery service inscribed on the left© RAWPIXEL.COM, CC BY 4.0

While the first records of lychee cultivation date back around 3,000 years, the source of domesticated varieties has remained unclear. That may be because the tree’s agricultural history is complex: comparative analyses of wild and cultivar genomes suggest there wasn’t a single moment in history when lychee trees were tamed. Instead, whole-genome sequencing analyses published January 3 in Nature Genetics indicate that people domesticated the plant twice to obtain trees that bloom at different times.

A team composed of scientists from the US and Chinese universities set out to generate a high-quality genome sequence for Feizixiao, a popular lychee hybrid bred by crossing an early-flowering variety with a late-blooming one. Using PacBio long reads corrected with Illumina short reads, the team assembled the cultivar’s 470-megabase genome, which they estimate is 96.2 percent complete. They then annotated it using RNAseq data and used it as a reference for whole-genome resequencing of 72 previously sequenced individuals, including 38 wild ones, representing various types of lychee.  

Phylogenetic analyses of these genomes suggested that the species originated in the southwestern province of Yunnan and then spread eastward and southward, including all the way to Hainan Island off China’s southeastern coast by an estimated 18,000 years ago. Millennia later, people began to cultivate trees from both places: ones from Yunnan that flowered early in the summer, and ones from Hainan that flowered later. These were then interbred to create Feizixiao and other intermediately flowering cultivars.

In addition to publishing the high-quality reference genome, the researchers dug into the differences between early- and late-flowering varieties in the hopes of discovering the genetic basis for bloom timing. Among their findings is a 3.7-kilobase deletion correlated with early flowering. The earliest-flowering varieties lack the region on both of their chromosomes, while late-flowering ones have two copies of the sequence. The hybrid Feizixiao is heterozygous for it.

“This is very useful for breeders. Because the lychee is perishable, flowering times have been important to extending the season for which the lychee is available in markets,” says Victor Albert, a University at Buffalo evolutionary biologist and a senior author of the study, in a press release. South China Agricultural University professor Rui Xia, also a senior author on the paper, adds that the deletion can serve as a biomarker for flowering time.

The authors also note that new genome sequence could facilitate a deeper understanding of other agriculturally useful traits and aid breeding programs in developing novel varieties—including, perhaps, trees that flower at dramatically different times, Albert tells Popular Science. And if so, then fresh lychee might become available year-round—something that could have only been a dream to Yang Guifei (and a nightmare to Emperor Xuanzong’s horses).

Runners Up

California wild radish (Raphanus sativus x raphanistrum) 

Despite the name, the California wild radish isn’t native to the US state—instead, it’s a hybrid of two species that were separately introduced to the region more than a century ago. First detected in the 1920s, this botanical mash-up has taken over, out-competing both parental species to become a widespread invasive weed. Its ecological success is likely due to its “unique combination of parental traits” write the authors of a December 16 Journal of Heredity study detailing the first whole-genome assembly for the hybrid. The sequence will shed light on the genetics of those traits, as well as generally “facilitate basic and applied research on this fascinating and problematic species,” they write in the paper’s conclusion.

A PHA-producing bacteria (Tepidimonas taiwanensis)

Reducing humanity’s reliance on oil requires finding substitutes for petroleum-based plastics. Among potential alternatives are biologically produced polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs), which accumulate naturally in bacteria such as Tepidimonas taiwanensis, a rod-shaped, motile species isolated from a hot spring in Taiwan. T. taiwanensis has also attracted interest from biotech companies because it exhibits potent alkaline protease activity, which is useful in sundry industries. The first whole-genome sequence for the species, published December 15 in Genome Biology and Evolution, should provide insight into the molecular basis of both of these useful features, the authors write.

By Heather Leah, WRAL multiplatform producer

GREENSBORO, N.C. — Tucked away in Guilford County, a patch of old-growth woods undeveloped since the 1800s still holds traces of the Underground Railroad’s hidden history.

Pieces of written and oral history tell stories of men and women escaping slavery, who hid in these woods, protected by the surrounding community of Quakers and free Black families.

At least one tree, far broader and taller than those around it, has been dated at more than 250 years old. Known as the ‘Underground Railroad Tree,’ it has stood as a silent witness to the countless men and women who hid here while escaping to freedom.

Local families were known to bring food, water, and supplies to freedom seekers hiding in the woods – which, at the time, were known as the New Garden Woods. Today, the woods are located on the campus of Guilford College, which was established first as a boarding school primarily for the Quaker community in 1837. Students and teachers were known for helping people hiding in those nearby woods, as well as providing education for African-Americans who were free from slavery.

‘My home Deep River:’ Signal songs created a virtual map to the Underground Railroad

Because the penalties for attempting to escape, or for helping someone else escape, were so severe, the Underground Railroad was often spoken about in code.

Signal songs were one way of communicating to freedom seekers hiding nearby, without directly alerting anyone to their hidden presence.

In this area of North Carolina, each ‘stop’ could often be found 20 to 30 miles apart. A ‘triangle’ of Quaker communities surrounded much of the Triad area – New Garden, Snow Camp, and Deep River – each of which provided their own ‘stop’ on the Underground Railroad. Each of these communities can still be found today.

A helper on the Underground Railroad might walk past the woods, knowing someone was hiding within, singing loudly to themselves, “My home, Deep River. My home is over Jordan. Deep River. I want to cross over into Camp Ground.”

These lyrics would let a person hidden nearby know that they could continue to Snow Camp or Deep River to find more helpers.

“Many of the enslaved people had some indication of where they could find help,” said Dr. Adrienne Israel, a retired professor of history at Guilford College. “They would find out here in New Garden where they could find other Friends.”

Members of the Quaker community, even today, often refer to themselves as ‘Friends.’ Back during the antebellum period, Israel says a common code phrase was: “Find a friend of a Friend.”

‘A friend of a Friend’ referred to anyone friendly with the Friends, who were known for helping with the Underground Railroad. Even advertisements in newspapers seeking men or women who had escaped slavery would often warn, “They might be hiding among the Quakers or free Black community.”

Friends bringing food, supplies to those hiding in the woods

People would often hide in the woods until they could safely move on to their next stop.

“They would hide there until they could find someone who was going north, who would hide them in their traveling group,” said Israel. “A group would pretend they were a free Black man or woman or hide them in a false-bottom wagon.”

They may even have falsified documents saying they had been freed, just in case they were caught or stopped.

This is very different than how the Underground Railroad functioned in Halifax County near the Roanoke River or along the coast like Elizabeth City or Washington. Depending on what geographical and cultural features you had to work with, the network to freedom worked very differently.

Quaker and abolitionist Levi Coffin, who lived in New Garden, walked into those very woods as a child, carrying armfuls of food, water, and supplies to the Freedom Seekers hiding there.

He wrote about his first formative experience seeing the injustices and cruelty of slavery in his book Reminiscences Of Levi Coffin.

“At a young age, Coffin saw a big cart full of enslaved people chained together walking along the road, and it included a child who was 8 years old, about the same age as he was,” said Israel. “The child was being abused – with whips and chains and all that, to force them along.”

Israel said Coffin broke down crying and asked his father: Why?

“He’d later say that was his awakening. It made him resolve to try and do something about it,” said Israel.

The New Garden Quaker community was not the only helpers in the area. The land along Horse Pen Creek Road was owned largely by Black families who were free from slavery. Many of them, Israel said, were also collaborators with helping along the Underground Railroad.

A Freedom Seeker could disguise themselves, carrying false papers, and travel with other free African-American families. However, the risk for helping was extremely severe – it could include being killed, or even losing your own freedom.

“White people could lose their property,” said Israel. “Free Black people caught helping someone escape could be enslaved.”

However, there were cases of both white and Black members of the Underground Railroad being killed for helping someone escape.

Likewise, anyone attempting to escape slavery was legally allowed to be killed.

“Any white person who stopped you could ask you to surrender yourself, and they could kill you,” said Israel.

Aside from Quakers and members of the free Black community, there were also people enslaved locally who participated in helping others to freedom. Gwen Erickson, Quaker Archivist & Special Collections Librarian, said, “In Coffin’s book, he mentions enslaved people who were crucial to this network.”

Visiting the Underground Railroad Tree

While the woods themselves are historic, the Underground Railroad Tree is one of only a handful of NC sites designated on the Underground Railroad Network to Freedom.

The tree isn’t hard to miss – towering over typical North Carolina trees, with an extremely thick trunk and antique bark. Historic signage has been put up nearby, as well as a wooden platform with benches, where visitors can sit in the shelter and contemplate the history that once happened beneath these very branches.

Guilford College’s archives have preserved some of the written and tangible history of the Underground Railroad’s activity on their campus and in the surrounding community.

Their collection includes antique copies of a local anti-slavery newspaper called The Liberator, old maps that show the historic layout of the area, and an original copy of Levi Coffin’s book.

The old maps give a clue as to why the New Garden Woods was an ideal hiding spot.

“If you look at the locations of New Garden, and Horse Pen Creek, and triangulate that with the local plantation — the woods are right in the center,” said Erickson.

Essentially, the woods were a private hiding place surrounded by helpful Quakers, free Black families, and even helpers who were enslaved locally.

The archives also have the ledger book of the New Garden Boarding school, which shows accounting of employees and teachers who worked there during its earliest years – some of whom continued to teach skills like reading and writing to members of the Black community, even as that became a riskier practice.

Today, the Underground Railroad tree is still standing in Guilford College Woods and is open for self-guided tours.

“It was there as a silent witness to all that took place,” said Erickson. “This root system and structure were here documenting all that unfolded.”

Many, Erickson said, feel this land is sacred. They visit to sit beneath the tree – a silent reminder of the men and women who risked everything for freedom – and those who helped them.

by University of Florida

Synergy isn’t always a good thing—take climate change and invasive plants.

Scientists have long hypothesized that climate change, by intensifying stressors like drought or wildfires, would make an ecosystem more vulnerable to invasive plants. Those invasive plants may in turn alter the environment in ways that amplify the impacts of climate change, explained Luke Flory, a professor of ecology in the UF/IFAS agronomy department. 

A new long-term field study conducted by Flory’s lab offers the first experimental evidence to support this hypothesis.

The study, published in the journal Ecology Letters, exposed small plots of long-leaf pine to three scenarios: drought conditions, colonization by the invasive plant cogongrass, and a combination of these two factors.

To test how the different scenarios influenced the trees’ survival, the scientists added another stressor: fire. But before lighting the first fire, the team waited almost six years for the trees to grow under each scenario.

When the smoke cleared, the researchers found that trees that experienced both drought and cogongrass invasion were least likely to survive after a fire.

“Less water meant the trees didn’t grow as tall. At the same time, the cogongrass, which is drought-tolerant, provided extra fuel to the fire, making it burn hotter and increasing the height of flames,” Flory said.

Shorter trees plus taller, hotter flames meant those longleaf pines didn’t stand much of a chance, he explained. In plots where the pines were able to grow taller or weren’t surrounded by fire-fueling cogongrass, the trees fared much better and nearly all trees survived.

Experiments that show the interplay of climate change and invasive plants provide important information for land managers in fire-prone areas or areas where prescribed fire is used, Flory said.

“In addition, these findings are one more reason why managing invasive plants is so important to conserving native ecosystems,” Flory said.

The experiment took place at UF’s Bivens Arm Research Site in Gainesville, Florida. To simulate drought, Flory’s team installed shelters over the growing trees that partially blocked rain.

Cogongrass and longleaf pines are no strangers to each other. Longleaf pine, the tree species used in the experiment, once covered much of the southeastern U.S., though it now covers only a small percentage of its historic range. This is also a region where cogongrass, which is native to southeast Asia, has established. Fast-growing and highly adaptable, cogongrass is known for taking over pasture and forest areas.

The Flory lab’s experiment is part of a larger global scientific effort called Drought-Net, which collects data from sites around the world to understand how different ecosystems respond to extreme drought. 

More information: S. Luke Flory et al, Interacting global change drivers suppress a foundation tree species, Ecology Letters (2022). DOI: 10.1111/ele.13974

Journal information: Ecology LettersProvided by University of Florida

By Aileen Baird & Francis Pope

To slow climate change and restore dwindling wildlife populations, the UK government aims to plant enough trees to expand the country’s woodland cover from 13% to 20% by 2050. Creating healthy woodlands on this scale is an enormous challenge, but forestry experts have developed guidance that, if followed, ought to give these new habitats the greatest chance of success.

It is really important that the right trees are planted in the right places. Choosing trees that are well suited to the habitat means they will grow better, be less prone to disease, and provide plentiful food and habitats for other organisms, such as lichens and insects.

It’s equally important to avoid planting trees in the wrong places. Preventing tree planting on grasslands and wetlands protects the unique species in them, and helps them hold onto the huge stores of carbon in their soils.

Despite containing detailed plans for the creation of healthy woodlands for plants and animals, there is a glaring omission in much of the new tree planting policy. For example, in the UK government’s Tree Action Plan – arguably the most important document relating to the country’s new reforestation agenda – there is no mention of fungi at all.

Fungi belong to an entirely separate kingdom of life from plants and animals and are found in every habitat on Earth. Beneficial mycorrhizal fungi form close relationships with trees, growing around or within their roots. These fungi harvest nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus from the soil and deliver them to the tree in exchange for carbon-rich sugars generated via photosynthesis.

The trees use their nutrients to make essential compounds such as chlorophyll, and the fungi convert their sugars into long-term stores in the soil which can hold up to 20% of the carbon taken up by trees. Fungi also control most decomposition in forests, breaking down compounds in leaves and dead wood that no other organisms can digest. Without fungi, forest systems simply would not function.

The fungus among us

Fungal friends in forests should not be ignored. To help guide people involved in creating new woodland, our new paper offers a number of ways that fungi can be considered to make these forests, and the people in them, as healthy as possible.

We need to maximize the benefits of beneficial fungi by protecting fungal diversity. Ancient woodlands and veteran trees are important habitats for lots of vital and rare fungi. Their rich fungal communities can disperse and populate new woodlands, helping to develop friendly mycorrhizal and decomposer networks in new forests.

Researchers don’t know enough about what happens to fungi in the soil when we plant trees. We don’t know which species are present before trees are planted and whether they change afterward. This means we don’t yet know how to maximize the benefits of fungi for tree health.

To build up our understanding, we suggest assessing the fungal populations in proposed and existing forest sites. As well as helping to keep trees healthy and storing carbon, this will also develop the list of fungi threatened with extinction and allow their legal protection.

This is important, as the study of fungi is hampered by the lack of legal protections for species. Without a policy to require surveys and studies of fungi, we never find out which species could help us store more carbon in forests, which can cause tree diseases, and whether these fungi are likely to become extinct soon. Only four fungal species are legally protected in the UK, but the country has lots of other important species, including globally rare grassland fungi. Similar to other groups of organisms, we think a Red List of fungal species at risk of extinction should be produced and made into law.

As well as the beneficial fungi, there are also fungi that can cause problems. Fungal diseases like ash dieback affect not only the tree populations themselves but the hundreds of other organisms which rely on trees to survive.

To minimize the risks of tree diseases, it’s important to monitor their emergence and spread in existing woodlands, as well as in tree seeds and saplings. To minimize the risks of woodland fungal spores to humans, which can exacerbate respiratory ailments, adding fungal spores to weather and pollen forecasts can help vulnerable people living near new woodlands prepare.

Remembering fungi in this new era of woodland creation will enable our forests, and the people in them, to be as healthy and resilient as possible.

By Stephanie Pappas 

The oldest trees in the forest carry outsized importance.

Ancient trees, the venerable sentinels of forests, may preserve genetic diversity that helps woodlands thrive for thousands of years, a new study suggests. 

In a typical deciduous forest, the oldest of the old trees — many of which were standing during the First Crusade — can act almost like time-travelers, representing the forest as it stood centuries before most of the trees around it were saplings. These ancient trees may have taken root in very different environmental circumstances as most other trees in the forest, meaning their offspring may have advantages should the environment change again. 

Some species of trees are famous for living to mind-bogglingly ripe old ages: The White Mountains of California are home to unique populations of extremely long-lived bristlecone pines (Pinus longaeva), which can survive more than 5,000 years. California’s Giant Sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum) has been recorded living longer than 3,000 years, as has the alerce (Fitzroya cupressoides) of Chile and Argentina. 

But even typical trees can have extraordinarily long lives, stretching for centuries. These ancients are now rare in North America thanks to logging and forest clearing, except in a handful of places in the Pacific Northwest and in some parts of Appalachia, said Charles Cannon, the director of the Center for Tree Science at the Morton Arboretum in Lisle, Illinois. Surviving ancients are now mostly found in the tropics, in places like Borneo and the Amazon, Cannon told Live Science – and those forests are shrinking every day. 

“I am getting more and more convinced that they are quite important and do play a crucial role,” Cannon said. “And once we lose them, they are gone. They are this property that emerges out of old-growth forests, out of centuries, and once we cut them down we’re not getting them back.” 

Forest elders 

In his new study, Cannon used computer models to estimate the prevalence of ancient trees as forests grow and mature. Because trees’ life spans are so much longer than humans’, computer modeling is one of the best ways to understand how forests change over long time periods, Cannon said. 

Unlike animals, trees aren’t programmed to die after a certain life span. Instead, their deaths come as a result of external forces, like a gale that turns their canopies into matchsticks or an insect infestation that saps them of nutrients. Once trees reach maturity and establish themselves, their death rates fall off dramatically, and death comes almost randomly. Studies of tree mortality in established forests peg the rate of mature tree death at around 1.5% to 2% of trees each year. 

With no internal clock ticking them closer to death, some trees win the life-span lottery, dodging drought, disease, and weather and surviving two to three times longer than the average tree in the forest. These oldest-old trees in an old-growth forest can reach ages of nearly 1,000 years. The age of the oldest trees in a forest depends heavily on the overall mortality rate of mature trees, Cannon and his colleagues reported on Jan. 31 in the journal Nature Plants. At 1% mortality, for example, the oldest trees can easily approach 1,000 years, and there can be hundreds of these ancients. At 3% mortality, the oldest trees are no more than 200 or 300 years old. This is troubling, Cannon said, because researchers have recorded increasing tree mortality around the world. This is due to climate impacts like drought and insect infestation, according to the Government of Canada website.  

The importance of age

A tree that rooted and flourished nearly a millennium ago may have done so in very different conditions than the younger trees around it. That’s important, Cannon said, because the ancient trees in the forest may have a different genetic profile compared with their younger neighbors. These oldest trees may provide something like a genetic insurance policy, producing seeds and pollen that can withstand unusual environmental conditions. 

Alternatively, Cannon said, the trees might sometimes be a drag on the forest. If their seedlings are adapted for nonexistent circumstances, their genetic contribution might actually weaken the forest as a whole. Either way, the large size of most ancients means that they produce large amounts of seeds and pollen, he said. And trees don’t stop reproducing with age, as animals do. Together, the trees’ size and age mean they can have an outsized impact on forest diversity and reproduction. 

It’s not easy to study ancient trees, Cannon said. They’re large, but may not be the largest in the forest, and dating trees isn’t always straightforward. Tropical trees, for example, don’t have the clearly delineated rings that trees in temperate regions with clear seasons do. Even in areas where trees are well-studied, scientists may not have a good catalog of tree ages.

“If you could go out and sample the age of many trees in one forest, we could see how the natural process is different from the statistical process [in the computer model],” Cannon said. “And that might give us some insight into the biology of what’s going on.”

Originally published on Live Science. 

By Helen Briggs

There are 14% more tree species than previously thought, according to what researchers are calling the first “scientifically credible” estimate.

Of the 73,300 estimated species, the researchers predict there are 9,200 that are yet to be discovered. But most rare species are in tropical forests, fast disappearing because of climate change and deforestation. The study is based on a database of tens of millions of trees in more than 100,000 forest plots around the world. The researchers used statistical techniques to predict the likely number of tree species, correcting for gaps in existing data. The findings suggest more must be done to protect the incredible life forms needed for food, timber, and medicine and to fight climate change by sucking carbon dioxide from the air.

Lead researcher Dr. Peter Reich, of the University of Minnesota in St Paul, said the findings highlighted the vulnerability of global forest biodiversity. “Our data will help us assess where biodiversity is the most threatened,” he told BBC News. “This is in the tropics and subtropics of South America, Africa, Asia, and Oceania and those are places where we discovered hotspots of known and unknown rare species. “Knowing about these hotspots, hopefully, can help prioritize future conservation efforts.”

South America – the continent with the most “missing” species – has about 43% of the total number, followed by:

• Eurasia (22%)
• Africa (16%)
• North America (15%)
• Oceania (11%)

Diverse natural forests are the most healthy and productive, important to the global economy and to nature. The vast majority are in tropical countries where deforestation is largely driven by:

• growing the ingredients of food eaten in the West, such as beef, palm oil and soy (the last two of these are also used for cattle feed)
• climate change
• fires

More than 140 international researchers worked on the study, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal. Dr. Yadvinder Malhi, of the University of Oxford, said tropical forests were the “global treasure chests of biodiversity” and significant absorbers of carbon dioxide emissions, slowing global warming. “This study shows that tropical forests are even more diverse in their trees than we had previously imagined,” he said.

A collection of tree seeds that went round and round the moon was scattered far and wide back home.

By Marina Koren

The American moon missions, more than 50 years later, are each memorable in their own way. Apollo 11, of course, is known for being the very first time human beings set foot on the moon. Apollo 12, for being a little rowdier. Apollo 13, for nearly ending in disaster. Apollo 14—the third of six moon landings—is known, as I recently discovered, for its “moon trees.”

Stuart Roosa, one of the Apollo 14 astronauts, took a small canvas bag of tree seeds with him on the journey. While his fellow astronauts walked on the lunar surface, Roosa and the seeds flew round and round the moon until the crew was ready to come back. A few years after the astronauts returned home, some of the seeds—sycamores, redwoods, pines, firs, and sweetgums—were planted across the United States, to see how they would grow, or simply to keep a piece of moon history close by.

I learned about the existence of moon trees earlier this month while thinking about the anniversary of Apollo 14, which launched on this day in 1971. (My tired pandemic brain had thought this year was the mission’s 50th anniversary but turns out we’re living in 2022!) I read online that one moon tree, a loblolly pine, had been planted by the White House, within walking distance of my apartment in Washington, D.C. What a great pandemic-appropriate outing for a space reporter, I thought. Then I noticed an asterisk next to the tree’s name, and scrolled down to discover: “An asterisk denotes a tree that is no longer alive.”

Oh. Nevermind.

That I could find a database of these trees, and go through the experience of identifying and losing the moon tree nearest me in five seconds, is because of Dave Williams, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, who 25 years ago took it upon himself to locate as many of them as he could. NASA didn’t keep any records on where the seeds from Apollo 14 ended up, nor did the agency keep up with the trees they became. But Williams does, even though it’s not part of his job description. He is not a tree expert, but he has become, through his efforts, the world’s foremost—and perhaps only—expert on moon trees.

Williams was once just as surprised as I was about the existence of these trees. He discovered them in 1996, through a third-grade teacher in Indiana. Joan Goble and her class had been working on a project about trees near their school, and a student came in one day saying she’d heard that something called a moon tree grew at a nearby Girl Scout camp. When the class went out there, they found an entirely normal-looking sycamore, with a little sign next to it that described the sycamore as a moon tree. Goble’s class wanted to write a thorough report, so the teacher emailed NASA for more information.

No one in Williams’s office in Maryland, not even the folks who had worked at NASA during the Apollo program, had heard of a moon tree. Williams checked with the agency’s history office, which uncovered some newspaper clippings revealing the existence of at least six such trees. From the outside, the moon trees were no different than their Earth-bound brethren. “There’s nothing strange about the moon trees at all,” Williams said. He emailed Goble back with what he’d learned, and then continued to dig.

Williams discovered that the head of the U.S. Forest Service had pitched Roosa, a former smoke jumper who fought forest fires, on the idea. The astronaut took about 500 seeds stuffed in sealed bags inside a metal canister, packed in the small canvas bag that every Apollo astronaut was allowed to fill with whatever they wanted. When the astronauts came back, the sealed bags went through a vacuum chamber—part of the standard decontamination protocol at the time—and accidentally burst, scattering the seeds. Stan Krugman, a geneticist at the forest service, sorted them by hand, then passed them on to a scientist who used some to experiment with germination at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, in Houston. The rest were sent to forestry-science facilities, which doled them out to communities across the country, grateful for a free piece of the Apollo era to spice up their municipal grounds.

The trees, planted mostly in 1976, took root just fine on Earth. Some of the moon seeds were planted next to seeds that had never traveled to space, to see whether they’d develop any differently. The most surprising result, Williams told me, occurred when the two seeds grew into two completely different species—a result of a gardening mixup, of course, not the weird effects of microgravity. NASA didn’t undertake any serious study of the moon trees. The effort was more a PR move, Williams said, than a science experiment.

After Williams wrote back to Goble, he posted an appeal online, asking anyone who came across a moon tree to contact him at NASA. Their story had been forgotten once, and if he didn’t keep track of these trees, who would?

And then people started reaching out, telling Williams that they’d spotted a tree paired with an intriguing plaque on their hike around town, sharing pictures. Over the years, Williams has waited for the moon trees to reveal themselves in this way, through an emailed proof of life. “It really can go for quite a while with getting nothing,” he said. “And then I’ll get a bunch.” As of today, Williams has located about 100 trees. Of those, 30 have died or been cut down. The sycamore that Goble discovered is still there; a storm twisted its top off some years back, but the tree has managed to recover, she told me.

Williams thinks that more undiscovered moon trees are out there. He just heard from a student at Delta State University, in Mississippi, who said they’ve heard rumors about a moon tree somewhere on campus and will try to find it, promising Williams that they’ll report back. Williams has visited quite a few over the years, and even hosted Goble and some of her students in Maryland to show them the sycamore growing near the Goddard center. What’s it like, I asked, seeing a moon tree? Isn’t it kind of anticlimactic, because it doesn’t look any different? Not to them. “I’m just in awe that this seed, the seed it grew from, went to space,” Goble said. “It went to orbit the moon.”

That’s why people see the moon trees as special: They know where those seeds went. Reaching the moon doesn’t take long—Apollo astronauts took just three days to get there—but it’s the moon. People haven’t stepped foot on the lunar surface since 1972, and it’s unclear when the next crew will go. All the trinkets and tchotchkes that the Apollo astronauts took with them in their personal canvas bags are cool for this reason, bestowed with a magical sheen the second they were returned to Earth—space souvenirs. But the seeds that Roosa, who died in 1994, carried feel different from other mementos. They weren’t put in museums or auctioned off. They were buried in the soil of the Earth, the only soil like it in the solar system—in the entire universe, as far as we know. Some might have disappeared, felled by storms or saws, before someone could find them and feel curious enough to ask NASA about them. But the ones that remain are living monuments to the time humankind escaped this world’s gravity and felt that of another.

SILVER LAKE, Ore. — When a monster of a wildfire whipped into the Sycan Marsh Preserve here in south-central Oregon in July, Katie Sauerbrey feared the worst.

Ms. Sauerbrey, a fire manager for The Nature Conservancy, the conservation group that owns the 30,000-acre preserve, was in charge of a crew helping to fight the blaze — the Bootleg fire, one of the largest in a summer of extreme heat and dryness in the West — and protect a research station on the property.

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It’s not every year that firefighters wrap the world’s largest living tree in an oversized aluminum blanket. But there they were this fall, in California’s Sequoia National Park, covering the 36-foot-wide base of the tree known as General Sherman to protect it from the state’s devastating fires.

Images of the wrapped giant seem to symbolize the world’s race to protect forests in the face of everything from extreme heat to a booming beef industry. Many trees burned this year across the West Coast and Canada, and others were deliberately cut down.

Deforestation in the Amazon rainforest reached its highest level in more than 15 years. And the consequence of losing all of those trees became clearer than ever: A study published in July found that parts of the Amazon now emit more carbon dioxide than they absorb, contributing to rapid global warming.

But there was plenty of hope, too. General Sherman survived, for one. And scientists discovered a handful of new forest-dwelling species, including what’s likely the world’s smallest reptile.

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It was around midnight when biologist Paola Muñoz awoke to the sounds of children laughing as pots and pans clattered to the kitchen floor. She listened from her room to an adult voice scolding the mischief-makers. It was followed by the whack of a broom and the barking of Alaska, the resident dog of the field station where she was staying, high in the Talamanca Mountains of Costa Rica. In the morning, she asked the station’s caretaker about the midnight ruckus. “He said, ‘It was those stupid nímbulos, they think it’s funny!’” she recalls. More than a decade after the incident, she regrets staying in her room. “I had the opportunity to see them,” she says. “I was just too afraid.”

Muñoz’s apparent near-encounter with the nímbulos is not unusual in this corner of the Talamancas. These child-like spirits are said to live in the forests around Cerro de la Muerte, the Mountain of Death. Rooted in Indigenous folklore, stories of the nímbulos have evolved in the telling. Spanish incursions in the 16th century tinged them with elements of Catholicism; more recently, concerns about climate change and deforestation have infused the tales with eco-activism. As the landscapes change, the stories change with them, reflecting and influencing the experiences of local people. Now, stories told of the nímbulos echo the plight of the region’s endangered and threatened species, such as the resplendent quetzal and Baird’s tapir: They must be actively protected or face extinction.

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BILLINGS, Mont. — The Biden administration said earlier this week that it will significantly expand efforts to stave off catastrophic wildfires that have torched areas of the U.S. West by more aggressively thinning forests around “hot spots” where nature and neighborhoods collide.

As climate change heats up and dries out the West, administration officials said they have crafted a $50 billion plan to more than double the use of controlled fires and logging to reduce trees and other vegetation that serves as tinder in the most at-risk areas. Only some of the work has funding so far.

Projects will begin this year, and the plan will focus on regions where out-of-control blazes have wiped out neighborhoods and sometimes entire communities — including California’s Sierra Nevada mountains, the east side of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, and portions of Arizona, Oregon and Washington state. Homes keep getting built in fire-prone areas, even as conditions that stoke blazes get worse.

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A tree that is new to science has been named after Leonardo DiCaprio. Scientists at Great Britain’s Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, said they wanted to honor the star for his help in saving a rainforest from logging.

The tree, which has been given the official name, Uvariopsis dicaprio, grows only in the Cameroon forest known for its incredible biodiversity.

“We think he was crucial in helping to stop the logging of the Ebo Forest,” said Dr Martin Cheek of Kew.

Scientists and conservationists were horrified when they heard of plans to allow vast swathes of the Ebo Forest to be opened up for logging.

One of the largest relatively untouched rainforests in Central Africa, it is home to the Banen people and an array of unique flora and fauna, including threatened gorillas, chimps and forest elephants. International experts wrote a letter to the government documenting the precious animal and plant species at risk of extinction. The issue was picked up by DiCaprio, whose social media posts to his millions of followers added momentum to the campaign.

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I meet Bob Leverett in a small gravel parking lot at the end of a quiet residential road in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. We are at the Ice Glen trailhead, half a mile from a Mobil station, and Leverett, along with his wife, Monica Jakuc Leverett, is going to show me one of New England’s rare pockets of old-growth forest. 

For most of the 20th century, it was a matter of settled wisdom that the ancient forests of New England had long ago fallen to the ax and saw. How, after all, could such old trees have survived the settlers’ endless need for fuel to burn, fields to farm and timber to build with? Indeed, ramping up at the end of the 17th century, the colonial frontier subsisted on its logging operations stretching from Maine to the Carolinas. But the loggers and settlers missed a few spots over 300 years, which is why we’re at Ice Glen on this hot, humid August day. 

To enter a forest with Bob Leverett is to submit to a convivial narration of the natural world, defined as much by its tangents as its destinations—by its opportunities for noticing. At 80, Leverett remains nimble, powered by a seemingly endless enthusiasm for sharing his experience of the woods with newcomers like me. Born and raised in mountain towns in the Southern Appalachians, in a house straddling the state line between Georgia and Tennessee, Leverett served for 12 years as an Air Force engineer, with stints in the Dakotas, Taiwan and the Pentagon, but he hasn’t lost any of his amiable Appalachian twang. And though he’s lived the majority of his life in New England, where he worked as an engineering head of a management consulting firm and software developer until he retired in 2007, he comes across like something between an old Southern senator and an itinerant preacher, ready to filibuster or sermonize at a moment’s notice. Invariably, the topic of these sermons is the importance of old-growth forest, not only for its serene effect on the human soul or for its biodiversity, but for its vital role in mitigating climate change.

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TONGASS NATIONAL FOREST, Alaska — The Sitka spruce soaring more than 180 feet skyward has stood on this spot on Prince of Wales Island for centuries. While fierce winds have contorted the towering trunks of its neighbors, the spruce’s trunk is ramrod straight. Standing apart from the rest of the canopy, it ascends to the height of a 17-story building.

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White oak trees that play a key role in the ecosystem and economy of Kentucky will see a significant decline soon without action to help the species regenerate.

That’s the takeaway from a recent report from an organization called the White Oak Initiative, which is aimed at bringing attention to the challenges facing the tree and recommending ways to counter the looming decline.

White oaks are a cornerstone species in forests of the eastern U.S., providing habitat and food for birds and animals and wood for a wide range of products such as flooring and cabinets. In Kentucky, that includes barrels for the signature bourbon industry. Bourbon has to be aged in new charred oak containers, which give it color and flavor.

All told white oaks play a role in billions of dollars of economic activity in Kentucky annually. The problem is that they are not regenerating at a sustainable level, according to the report.

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GUY SHRUBSOLE IS ON A mission to map one of the world’s most endangered rainforests—a moss- and mist-shrouded stretch of ancient oak, pine, birch, and ash along the western shores of Britain. Fed by fierce gales, intense rainfall, and high levels of humidity, Britain’s Atlantic coast was once home to vast swathes of woodland known as “temperate rainforests,” and is now the unlikely location for Shrubsole’s ambitious conservation project.

Woodland conservationists consider the few fragments of ancient temperate rainforests that survive in Britain to be in more danger than their tropical counterparts, says Shrubsole, who describes himself as a “very amateur, but very enthusiastic naturalist.” “Knowing where the rainforests are is a crucial part of knowing how to save them,” he says. So Shrubsole, using crowdsourced information collected through his Lost Rainforests of Britain website, has begun plotting Britain’s first comprehensive rainforest map.

Atlas Obscura spoke to Shrubsole about his rainforest wanderings, rare moss and curious ferns, and how a crowdsourced mapping project can help save Britain’s ancient woodlands from destruction.

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SISTERS, OREGON — Brittle pine needles and twigs snap under Don Grandorff’s boots as he crunches his way through Deschutes National Forest, the August air scented with sap and wildfire smoke. Without hesitating, he veers off the path and wades through the brush, on the hunt for Ponderosa pine seeds.

Grandorff has been a seed forager for 45 years, and he spots the signs of a squirrel’s hidden cache immediately: clusters of green pine needles fanned out on the forest floor; a newly nibbled cone; and a long, shallow dirt trail that disappears under a log.

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China punished and demoted 10 officials in the southern city of Guangzhou after thousands of banyan trees were cut down or uprooted by the local government, prompting a rare personal intervention by President Xi Jinping. 

Li Xi, the party chief of Guangdong province, told local cadres that a spate of tree destruction in the provincial capital since late 2020 had “severely damaged natural ecology” and “hurt people’s fond memories” of the city, leading to “irreversible losses.” He spoke at a meeting held on Sunday, according to a report by the official Southern Daily. 

Li indicated that the president had directly expressed displeasure with the situation. While ordering officials to rectify the tree issue, Li urged them to closely study Xi’s instructions and “deeply comprehend” his special care for the city and province.

With China’s environment under immense pressure after decades of historic growth, Xi has sought to cast himself as a champion of green causes, expressed in his edict that “green mountains are gold mountains and silver mountains.” He says he wants China to become an “eco-civilization,” where humans live in harmony with nature. That Xi commented directly on a relatively minor city-level issue indicates the close attention he’s paying to environmental matters.

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Jason and Aga Jones loved the magnificent oak tree that was once the centerpiece of their backyard. In 2013 — a year after they bought their home in Takoma Park, Md. — they restored a circular stone retaining wall around the base of the tree. In 2019, they added an extension to the back of the home with enormous windows from which they could admire the majestic branches and watch squirrels build nests and collect acorns.

Then late last summer, when they hired a company to lop off branches encroaching on the neighbor’s yard, the company’s workerspointed out ominous symptoms: browning leaves, dead branches. Within a year, the tree was dead.

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By Maria Popova, The Marginalian

There is something about the skeletal splendor of winter trees — so vascular, so axonal, so pulmonary — that fills the lung of life with a special atmosphere of aliveness. Something beyond the knowledge that wintering is the root of trees’ resilience, beyond the revelation of their fractal nature and how it salves the soul with its geometry of grief. Something that humbles you to the barest, most beautiful face of the elemental.

I know of no one who has captured that singular enchantment better than the artist, naturalist, philosopher, entomologist, and educator Anna Botsford Comstock (September 1, 1854–August 24, 1930).

In 1902, nine years before she laid the cultural groundwork for what we now call youth climate action in her exquisite field guide to wonder, Comstock wrote an article for the magazine Country Life that became, fourteen years later, her slender, tender book Trees at Leisure (public library | public domain) — a love letter to the science, splendor, and spiritual rewards of our barked, branched, rooted chaperones of being.

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IN THE WASATCH MOUNTAINS OF the western United States, on the slopes above a spring-fed lake, there dwells a single giant organism that provides an entire ecosystem on which plants and animals have relied for thousands of years. Found in my home state of Utah, “Pando” is a 106-acre stand of quaking aspen clones.

Although it looks like a woodland of individual trees with striking white bark and small leaves that flutter in the slightest breeze, Pando (Latin for “I spread”) is actually 47,000 genetically identical stems that arise from an interconnected root network. This single genetic individual weighs around 6,000 metric tons. By mass, it is the largest single organism on Earth.

Aspen trees do tend to form clonal stands elsewhere, but what makes Pando interesting is its enormous size. Most clonal aspen stands in North America are much smaller, with those in the western U.S. averaging just 3 acres. Pando has been around for thousands of years, potentially up to 14,000 years, despite most stems only living for about 130 years. Its longevity and remoteness mean a whole ecosystem of 68 plant species and many animals have evolved and been supported under its shade. This entire ecosystem relies on the aspen remaining healthy and upright. But, although Pando is protected by the U.S. Forest Service and is not in danger of being cut down, it is in danger of disappearing due to several other factors.

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ADRIAN PATRUT AND HIS TEAM flew in from three different continents to study the “Big Tree” at Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe, and for good reason. The Big Tree is a colossal structure, soaring over 80 feet in the air, around 75 feet in circumference, with bulky branches, many stems that make up its trunk, and a wide, gaping hole at its core. The Big Tree is thought to be one of the largest and oldest African baobab trees in the world.

Once the team of three arrived at Victoria Falls, they immediately rented a car to see the Big Tree in person. Its proximity to the falls, a major tourist destination, means that millions of visitors see it in a normal year, making it a sensation in its own right. The sight did not disappoint, Patrut says. “It was as if we had entered straight into a museum, into a well-known painting of a master, but we operated as scientists,” according to the nuclear chemist at Babes-Bolyai University in Romania. “I circled the baobab and admired it from all possible angles.”

Patrut, who has been studying ancient trees for decades, and his team made the pilgrimage to study the growth, age, and architecture of the tree. Dating ancient trees often involves counting “growth rings” that appear seasonally, a tried and true method that unfortunately doesn’t work well for baobabs. These often massive trees have only very faint growth rings, and many have large cavities in their trunk and stems that confound attempts to date them. Until recently, most evaluations of African baobab trees have been “guesstimates,” he says.

But over the past decade, Patrut has been refining a more precise method for estimating the age of baobab trees: radiocarbon dating. Patrut has used it on trees across the continent: South Africa, Mozambique, Namibia. For the Big Tree, his team found that its multiple stems have different ages, with its oldest one dating back to about 870, around the time that Vikings first settled in Iceland.

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Erie, Pa. has a Chestnut Street.

So do the Erie County municipalities of Cranesville and Corry, Girard and Lake City, Edinboro, Waterford and North East.

There’s a reason you find so many stretches of road that carry that name here and elsewhere in the eastern United States. American chestnut trees once numbered into the billions, stretching from Maine to Mississippi.

“The American chestnut was a very plentiful tree, especially in Pennsylvania,” said Sara Fitzsimmons, director of restoration at The American Chestnut Foundation at Penn State University.

The American chestnut was known as a cradle-to-coffin tree because its rot-resistant wood served people’s needs from birth to death. It also produced healthy and tasty nuts eaten by humans and their animals as well as by wildlife.

Then a blight, first officially identified in 1904 in the Bronx Zoo, struck American chestnut trees. They never recovered and are now considered to be “functionally extinct.” New trees sprout, but most don’t live that long. A few old “survivors,” often scarred by the blight, are known to be out there, including in Erie County. And now the American chestnut is facing another challenge, identified by a Penn State Behrend student at a research site in North East Township.

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Bear and Melissa LeVangie spent much of their childhood aloft, in a then-forested area of Massachusetts. “Our mother would say, I don’t want to see you until it is dark,” said Bear LeVangie. “We would climb an 80-foot — it seemed like a 100-foot then — white pine and hang out and not think twice about it.”

The twins still spend much of their time in and around trees: Both are arborists, which is akin to being tree doctors. Both are seeing a surge in demand for arborists because the region’s trees are faring so poorly.

“I would never have anticipated how fast things are declining,” said Melissa LeVangie, who works for Shelter Tree, a tree care supply company, and is tree warden, or caretaker, for the town of Petersham in central Massachusetts.

As climate change accelerates, the trees in the Eastern forests of the United States are increasingly vulnerable. For many arborists, the challenges facing trees are reshaping and expanding the nature of their work. Many said they are spending more time on tree removal than ever before — taking down dead or unhealthy trees, or trees damaged or felled by storms.

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Refugees are on the move in forests across the western U.S. As climate conditions change, the ranges of tree species are shifting, especially toward cooler or wetter sites. A new Stanford analysis provides some of the first empirical evidence that wildfire is accelerating this process, likely by reducing competition from established species. The study, published Nov. 15 in Nature Communications, raises questions about how to manage land in an era of shifting ecosystems – a key issue as President Biden prepares to sign into law an infrastructure bill that allocates more than $5 billion for forest restoration and wildfire risk reduction.

“Complex, interdependent forces are shaping the future of our forests,” said study lead author Avery Hill, a graduate student in biology at Stanford’s School of Humanities & Sciences. “We leveraged an immense amount of ecological data in the hopes of contributing to a growing body of work aimed at managing these ecosystem transitions.”

As the climate changes, animal and plant species are shifting their ranges toward conditions suitable for their growth and reproduction. Past research has shown that plant ranges are shifting to higher, cooler elevations at an average rate of almost five feet per year. In many studies, these range shifts lag behind the rate of climate change, suggesting that some species may become stranded in unsuitable habitats. The factors that impact plant species’ ability to keep up with climate change are key to maintaining healthy populations of the dominant trees in western forests, yet have remained largely mysterious.

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From The Marginalian by Maria Popova…

Autumn is the season of ambivalence and reconciliation, soft-carpeted training ground for the dissolution that awaits us all, low-lit chamber for hearing more intimately the syncopation of grief and gladness that scores our improbable and finite lives — each yellow burst in the canopy a reminder that everything beautiful is perishable, each falling leaf at once a requiem for our own mortality and a rhapsody for the unbidden gift of having lived at all. That dual awareness, after all, betokens the luckiness of death.

But autumn is also the season of revelation, for the seeming loss unveils a larger reality: Chlorophyll is a life-force but it is also a cloak, and when trees shed it from their leaves, nature’s true colors are revealed.

Photosynthesis is nature’s way of making life from light. Chlorophyll allows a tree to capture photons, extracting a portion of their energy to make the sugars that make it a tree — the raw material for leaves and bark and roots and branches — then releasing the photons at lower wavelengths back into the atmosphere. A tree is a light-catcher that grows life from air.

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THROUGHOUT THE COASTS OF THE Caribbean, Central America, the northern edges of South America, and even in south Florida, there can be found a pleasant-looking, beachy sort of tree, often laden with small greenish-yellow fruits that look not unlike apples.

You might be tempted to eat the fruit. Do not eat the fruit. You might want to rest your hand on the trunk or touch a branch. Do not touch the tree trunk or any branches. Do not stand under or even near the tree for any length of time whatsoever. Do not touch your eyes while near the tree. Do not pick up any of the ominously shiny, tropic-green leaves. If you want to slowly but firmly back away from this tree, you would not find any argument from any botanist who has studied it.

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When you think of Florida, beaches and palm trees come to mind. But what if those palm trees were slowly replaced with other trees? That could happen over time because of climate change, and communities in South Florida are trying to save the world from the climate crisis, one tree at a time.

“Palm trees do not sequester carbon at the same rate as our native canopy trees and do not provide shade, cool down streets and sidewalks to help counter the urban heat island effect that canopy trees do,” said Penni Redford, the Resilience and Climate Change Manager for West Palm Beach.

With atmosphericcarbon dioxide levels today higher than at any point in at least the past 800,000 years, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Earth needs to remove it or humans have to stop adding it. In fact, the last time carbon dioxide concentration was this high was more than 3 million years ago.

Scientists are working on solutions to capture and safely contain atmospheric carbon. One approach is called “terrestrial sequestration” — which is essentially planting trees. A tree absorbs carbon during photosynthesis and stores it for the life of the tree.

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Forests are having their moment. Because trees can vacuum carbon from the atmosphere and lock it away in wood and soil, governments and businesses are embracing efforts to fight climate change using trees.

Nations have pledged to plant or restore forests over a combined area larger than India. One corporate-backed initiative has secured pledges to conserve or restore 855 million trees by 2030. Even President Donald Trump, an ardent climate change skeptic, endorsed a trillion-tree planting initiative at the World Economic Forum in January; a companion bill was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives in February.

Scientists agree that new trees and forests can, in theory, cool the planet. But many have warned that the enthusiasm and money flowing to forest-based climate solutions threaten to outpace the science.

Two papers published this week seek to put such efforts on a firmer footing. One study quantifies how much carbon might be absorbed globally by allowing forests cleared for farming or other purposes to regrow. The other calculates how much carbon could be sequestered by forests in the United States if they were fully “stocked” with newly planted trees. Each strategy has promise, the studies suggest, but also faces perils.

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In July 2018, a century-old red oak went live on Twitter. The account @awitnesstree, tweeting from the Harvard Forest in Petersham, Massachusetts, introduces itself in its bio:

“Witnessing life as a tree in a changing environment for more than a century. Views are my own – sort of (data translated by scientists and communicators at HF).”

Every few days, the tree updates its 9,118 followers. On February 24 2020 it posted: “The last 2 days were extremely hot for February. When is this heatwave going to end?”

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From the transcript of Ezra Klein’s podcast, “The Ezra Klein Show.”

Sometimes I finish these conversations, and I feel I’ve been given a gift. And this is one of them. This is really one of them. Richard Powers is the author of 13 novels, including, famously, “The Overstory,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2019. I loved “The Overstory.” I loved it. I’ve never walked through a forest the same way again. And a lot of people loved it. When I interviewed him earlier this year and asked for his three books, former President Barack Obama recommended “The Overstory.” And he said, quote, “it changed how I thought about the Earth and our place in it.” Hell of an endorsement.

Powers has a new book out, “Bewilderment.” And I think “Overstory” and “Bewilderment” should be understood as a couplet. “The Overstory” is about the world beyond us — the slow, powerful life of the trees and the forests and the way all of that shapes us. You can also call it the outer story. And “Bewilderment,” by contrast, is the inner story.

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Two good things happened here recently that I didn’t see coming. First, our Metro Council passed a bill, which Mayor John Cooper signed, that increases protections for trees on city land. Second, the proposal for an outrageously terrible subdivision in Whites Creek, one of the few remaining rural tracts of Davidson County, was rejected by the Metro Planning Commission.

Positive as the recent environmental news here may be, small-scale victories like these don’t normally rise to the level of national attention. But as a measure of what is possible, they have given me more hope for the future than I’ve had in a long time.

That’s because these particular environmental wins were not the result of lawsuits or transfers of political power. They were the result of widespread and nonpartisan public outcry. And they tell us of what can happen in any city, anywhere, when people start recognizing trees as a kind of civic infrastructure and the natural world as a public good.

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Ebba Patterson was driving home from work along Highway 101 in Oregon this April when something caught her eye—a flash of red along the side of the road. Peterson, a plant epidemiologist, recognized it as the foliage of sick trees and pulled over.

After bushwhacking to reach the site, Peterson was dismayed by what she saw: two trees, seemingly in the throes of a disease called sudden oak death. They had flaring brown-red canopies and blackening twigs. “I’m looking out the window, I see these dead crowns, I think: ‘Shit!” Peterson recalls.

She clipped some samples and took them back to her lab for analysis. “The second time I cursed was when I looked at those petri plates,” she remembers. The culture tested positive: It was sudden oak death.

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At around 1,100 years old, and almost 11m (36ft) in girth, the Big Belly Oak is the oldest tree in Savernake Forest in southwest England. A tiny sapling at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, Big Belly Oak has lived through the War of the Roses, the Black Death, the English Civil War, the Industrial Revolution, and two world wars. Now gnarled and knobbly, Big Belly Oak’s trunk is strapped up with a metal girdle to keep it from falling apart.

While an ancient tree like this is impressive at a distance, take a look inside and you will see something even more intriguing.

Oak polypore fungi and stag beetle larvae feast on the dead heartwood, adult stag beetles sup the sugary liquid from the “sap runs”, the living layers of wood that transport water and minerals throughout the tree. Hoverflies lay eggs in water-filled rot holes, rat-tailed maggots devour leaf litter and violet click beetles eat up wood mold that is rich with feces and other remains, accumulating over a century. Knothole moss and pox lichen cling to the bark in rainwater channels. Barbastelle bats hibernate in crevices and under loose bark. Woodpeckers and nuthatch enlarge holes for nesting, while owls, kestrels, marsh tit, and tree-creeper move into ready-made cavities.

These rich pockets of life are a secret world, a diverse habitat teeming with insects, fungi, lichen, birds and bats. The ancients of our forests provide essential food and shelter for more than 2,000 of the UK’s invertebrates species. In Savernake Forest alone, these trees are home to nearly 120 species of lichen, more than 500 species of fungi, and other important wildlife such as the elusive white-letter hairstreak butterflies.

We face losing these micro-worlds as, one by one, the ancient trees of today are dying and there are not enough ready to replace them.

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In July 2019, construction workers renovating a pond at a golf course in Tetney, England, stumbled onto a 4,000-year-old wooden coffin. Now, reports BBC News, the Bronze Age relic is set to go on display at the Collection Museum in Lincoln after undergoing extensive preservation work.

Per a statement from the University of Sheffield, the half-ton sarcophagus contained human remains, an ax and plants used as a bed for the deceased. Made from the hollowed-out trunk of an oak tree, it was buried beneath a gravel mound—a practice typically reserved for elite members of Bronze Age society. The coffin measures around ten feet long and three feet wide.

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WHEN THE FURY OF HURRICANE Maria subsided long enough to allow Amira Odeh to leave her grandmother’s home in Bayamón, Puerto Rico, she stepped into a terrifying scene. “It was like waking up in a sci-fi, alien-invasion kind of movie,” she says. “All of this destruction.”

The storm that swept through the Caribbean in the fall of 2017 devastated Puerto Rico, where Odeh was born and raised. High winds, floods, and landslides killed people across the island, destroyed the power grid, and wrecked innumerable homes. Next came months of hardship, as shuttered ports and a carelessly executed aid effort from the mainland United States meant few supplies for weeks on end. “We didn’t have anything to eat,” says Odeh. While the semi-official death toll from the storm is 4,645, the lack of food, clean water, electricity, and shelter led to many more preventable deaths.

But in the immediate aftermath of the storm, the memory that most stands out for Odeh was that first glimpse of the post-Maria landscape. “There wasn’t green anymore,” she says. “A tropical landscape always has green. And the only thing green was the grass. There were no trees.”

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Between a third and half of the world’s wild tree species are threatened with extinction, posing a risk of wider ecosystem collapse, the most comprehensive global stocktake to date warns.

Forest clearance for farming is by far the biggest cause of the die-off, according to the State of the World’s Trees report, which was released on Wednesday along with a call for urgent action to reverse the decline. The five-year, international study found 17,510 species of trees are threatened, which is twice the number of threatened mammals, birds, amphibians and reptiles combined.

This was 29.9% of the 58,497 known species of trees in the world. But the proportion at risk is likely to be higher as a further 7.1% were deemed “possibly threatened” and 21.6% were insufficiently evaluated. Only 41.5% were confirmed as safe.

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ON A BRIGHT, BUGGY JUNE day, I set off across a Maine river into a preserve called The Hermitage. I was in search of a pine tree claimed by the king of England centuries ago. Snow, mud, and raging water make the preserve impassable at different times of the year, but in early summer the river reached just above my ankle. Ahead of me, on the river’s north bank, sloped a stand of tangled beech, sugar maple, and hemlock—and then, rising above the understory, the straight mud-brown trunks of eastern white pines, crowned by ragged branches at their peaks. These were big trees, ancient trees, more than 120 feet tall, the kind you don’t expect to see on the logging-decimated East Coast.

It was Jeff McCarthy, a roofer who grew up here in north-central Maine, who first told me that I should come here to look for the last king pines, trees that were marked by surveyors for the king centuries ago. McCarthy grew up playing in sporting camps—rustic resorts that are a treasured Maine tradition—near The Hermitage. In the 1990s, he and his friends would try to wrap their arms around the preserve’s larger trees. Sometimes, even three of them together couldn’t complete the circle. When wind felled the trees around the camps, they would count the rings on the stumps: Once, he said, they counted 275, making the tree older than the United States.

Click here to read the rest of the article in Atlas Obscura.

Forests can be enchanting places — the sunlight filtering through the trees, wildlife scampering in the underbrush, trunks reaching to the sky. They can also be bastions of solitude and quiet, the only break in the stillness from the snap of a branch,  a breeze rustling the leaves, or, perhaps, the faint whispers of a secret. Some forests hold ruins, sculptures, artifacts, even entire museums waiting to captivate the next intrepid explorer.

On the outskirts of the Forest of Fontainebleau in Noisy-sur-École, France, is a sandy but waterless beach surrounded by pine and birch, perhaps a relic of an ancient ocean. In the woods of Härjedalen, Sweden, a statue of one of Hollywood’s greatest actors is hidden in the dense foliage, fitting for a starlet with a reputation as a recluse. And in New Jersey, forest is taking over the remains of a grand mansion. From a stained-glass window that illuminates the forest floor to strange stone carvings, here are a dozen of our favorite woodland secrets.

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The James River Association, the Virginia Department of Forestry, and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation are working with landowners across the middle and upper James watershed to restore or create forest buffers that improve the quality of local waterways through their James River Buffer Program.

The James River Buffer Program will require hundreds of thousands of tree seedlings to meet established goals for improving water quality and soil health. However, Virginia’s current capacity to supply hardwood seedlings does not match the growing demand.

The Augusta Forestry Center, a Virginia Department of Forestry nursery in Crimora, supplies most of Virginia’s seedlings. The self-supported nursery has served the tree planting needs of the Commonwealth for over a century, but it is currently short-staffed, an issue that has worsened since the Covid-19 pandemic. To meet the increased demand for hardwoods like oaks, maples, and hickories, they need more support (especially in the form of hands-on labor).

The Chesapeake Bay Foundation hosted two volunteer events this summer. CBF staff, partners, and volunteers worked alongside nursery staff to assist with the simple—yet critical—task of weeding in the seedling beds. While weeding isn’t quite as glamorous as tree planting, it’s equally important. If seedlings aren’t healthy when they’re planted, they won’t have a great chance at success in a riparian buffer or elsewhere, which can be disheartening for landowners and conservation professionals alike.

Among basic inputs like water, light, and nutrients/fertilizers, young trees must be free of unnecessary competition from other plants to thrive. And while there are certain situations for which herbicides can be used, the majority of weed removal must be completed by hand to prevent damage to seedlings. Though it can be tough work to remove weeds manually, there’s no better way to start the day than by working in the shadow of the magnificent Blue Ridge Mountains with our hands in the soil.

“I just want people to know that we exist, we are here, and we have high-quality product,” says Nursery Manager Joshua McLaughlin. Starting October 1, 2021, you can place an order with the Augusta Forestry Center for the next planting season by visiting https://www.buyvatrees.com/. McLaughlin also asks for help collecting acorns and nuts this fall. Locally sourced seeds have better chances of long-term survival, since they are adapted to local environmental conditions. In September, VDOF will announce the details for this year’s acorn/nut drive at https://dof.virginia.gov/.

Meeting Virginia’s goal of 70,000 acres of new riparian buffer within the James River watershed by 2025 requires the collaboration of several partners. The James River Association (JRA) convenes the Upper & Middle James Riparian Consortium that supports this wide network of partners that acquire and provide funding and technical assistance for landowners such as the Natural Resources Conservation Service, local Soil and Water conservation Districts, and non-profits such as JRA and CBF, as well as contractors who prepare sites for tree planting and install and maintain buffers. Those who source the plant material, our nurseries, are also crucial to this collaboration. Thus, our partnership with the Virginia Department of Forestry and their Augusta Forestry Center is critical for the health of the James and Chesapeake Bay watersheds.

If interested in learning more about the Augusta Forestry Center, volunteer opportunities, or other ways you can get involved, email Joshua McLaughlin at joshua.mclaughlin@dof.virginia.gov.

Yesterday morning, JRA’s CEO Bill Street joined leaders from The Conservation Fund, Capital Region Land Conservancy, Virginia Department of Conservation & Recreation, The Salvation Army Boys & Girls Club, and Richmond Public Schools to announce the purchase of 5.2 acres on Richmond’s riverfront and plans for a future river education center.

The JRA is under contract to purchase just under one acre of land from The Conservation Fund with the intention of building a river center for environmental education programs. The James River Center will focus on connecting Richmond youth with immersive river-based, hands-on learning experiences while inspiring confidence, ecological understanding, nature appreciation, and conservation action.

“I applaud The Conservation Fund, Capital Region Land Conservancy, and James River Association for working together to expand the James River Park System with the purchase of 5.2 acres of riverfront property. This significant acquisition, and plans for the James River Center, will benefit Richmonders for generations to come.” -Levar Stoney, City of Richmond Mayor

Click here to learn more about the land acquisition and the future James River Center.

From the window of the apartment I’m staying in I can see the top of a not very tall but very remarkable tree, one that has occasionally been distracting me from the story I came to Paris for. I know the tree (pictured above) is remarkable because a plaque identifies it as the city’s oldest, planted in 1601. It’s a black locust, Robinia pseudoacacia, and it came originally from the Appalachians, in the United States.

Now, for various reasons that 1601 date is doubtful. But it appears likely that the tree was indeed planted sometime in the early 17th century by one Jean Robin, gardener to a succession of French kings. It has survived wars and revolutions and this summer has sprouted a nice full head of greenery. A wounded old soldier itself—its scarred trunk is kept upright by concrete braces—it turns out to have been the spearhead of an invading army: Since the 17th century, American black locusts have advanced across Europe and indeed the world.

In Central Europe, especially, foresters soon fell in love with them. Black locusts grew quickly on land that had been denuded for firewood, protecting it from erosion. More recently, on the Loess Plateau in northwestern China, 25 million acres have been planted with black locusts over the last few decades to combat some of the worst soil erosion on Earth. Black locust wood is valuable too, and not just for burning; it’s hard and durable. Four centuries after Robin first planted the American import in his garden, Robinia is advertised here as the only “European” wood that can be used for garden furniture without pesticide treatment—a sustainable alternative to imported tropical teak.

The trouble is, black locust doesn’t stay where it’s planted. It’s incredibly invasive, spreading by underground runners. In that it’s like another hardy pioneer, Ailanthus altissima, aka the tree of heaven, which in the 18th century traveled the world in the other direction, from China to America, with Paris botanists again offering a crucial assist. American gardeners fell in love with the pretty tree, which grows just about anywhere, even through cracks in pavement—it’s the central character in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. But as Troy Farrahreported recently for Nat Geo, scientists are now desperately looking for a way to kill the biodiversity-wrecking “tree of hell,” pinning their hopes on a newly discovered fungus.

The world is a mess, our mess. Czech scientists, reviewing the spread of black locusts in southern Europe recently, concluded: “Our results confirm that it is difficult to answer an important question, whether Robinia should be cultivated and promoted, widely tolerated, or eradicated as a dangerous invasive alien.” The answer has to be local, case-by-case, they said.

About 500 feet north of the oldest tree lies the wreck I came here for: the cathedral of Notre Dame. It’s a portal into the 12th and 13th centuries, but also the 19th, when it was extensively rebuilt. The team now rebuilding the church again, after the catastrophic 2019 fire that sent its steeple crashing through its soaring vaults, are trying to recapture both those layers of history. The scruffy black locust that’s rarely noticed in the little park across the Seine is a reminder that in the natural world too, we can only rarely unwind the complicated history we’ve created. We can just try to manage it better.

Thirty miles north of San Francisco, Tom Stapleton sets out on a trail that takes him deep into the forest, weaving around the massive trunks of redwoods. The trees have special significance for him. “Being in a redwood forest is actually like being in a cathedral,” he says. “There’s something that’s very spiritual, very humbling and moving there. It makes you seem so insignificant because you’re this human being that’s a tiny speck compared to these towering trees.” He veers off the trail, consulting a secret map that will lead him to the “ghosts of the forest.”

For decades, Stapleton has searched for and logged rare albino redwoods, their silver-white branches a stark contrast to the dark wood of the surrounding forest, and even less common wild chimera redwoods, which sport patchworks of green and white needle leaves. Collaborating with albino redwood researchers and enthusiasts, he has found more than 500 albino redwoods and 116 wild chimeras. Their locations are kept secret to protect them from souvenir hunters or other vandals. Although curiosity and wonder drove his initial interest, Stapleton is now working with researchers to understand why these unusual trees exist, and what their presence may mean for the health of surrounding trees and even entire ecosystems.

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NAPERVILLE, Ill. — A man who said he sprayed trees in a suburban Chicago park to protect them after an anxious dog chewed off the bark has been ticketed by authorities.

Asher Thomas is accused of “altering flora” in a Naperville dog park. The ticket from the Will County Forest Preserve carries a $225 fine, the Aurora Beacon-News reported.

“Just as you can’t go around doing things to other people’s property, even if intentions are good, you can’t allow your dogs to do damage or spray a foreign substance on trees,” said Forest Preserve Deputy Police Chief Dave Barrios.

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Along the Atlantic coast of the United States, climate-driven sea-level rise is sending salt water increasingly farther inland. The encroaching brine is killing off coastal woodlands in places like North Carolina, leaving behind “ghost forests” of lifeless trees.

Now, a new study suggests these expanding, ghoulish ecosystems are also contributing to climate change via a much less spooky-sounding phenomenon: “tree farts,” reports Valerie Yurk for E&E News.

When these dead trees—or snags as researchers call them—break wind, they release greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, according to the paper published last week in the journal Biogeochemistry. While tree farts still pale in comparison to emissions from soil, they increased the total emissions of the ecosystem by around 25 percent, according to a statement.

The researchers say quantifying the carbon emissions of these ghost forests will become even more important in the future as sea-level rise drowns more trees.

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Last year, California’s Castle fire may have killed off ten to 14 percent of the world’s giant sequoias, reports Joshua Yeager of the Visalia Times-Delta.

The tally of dead trees comes from a new draft report that used satellite imagery, forest modeling, and surveys to revise initial estimates of how many titanic trees were lost when flames ripped through parts of Kings Canyon and Sequoia National Parks. That initial estimate was around 1,000 dead sequoias, but now scientists with the National Park Service and U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) suspect between 7,500 and 10,600 mature trees may have died, reports Kurtis Alexander for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Per the Chronicle, among the fallen is the planet’s ninth-largest giant sequoia, nicknamed the King Arthur tree. Sequoias can live for thousands of years and grow to more than 250 feet tall and measure 30 feet in diameter, per the Chronicle.

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The world must rewild and restore an area the size of China to meet commitments on nature and the climate, says the UN, and the revival of ecosystems must be met with all the ambition of the space race.

Existing conservation efforts are insufficient to prevent widespread biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse, the global body has warned at the launch of the decade on ecosystem restoration, an urgent call for the large-scale revival of nature in farmlands, forests and other ecosystems.

Governments must deliver on a commitment to restore at least 1bn hectares (2.47bn acres) of land by 2030 and make a similar pledge for the oceans, according to the report by the UN Environment Programme (Unep) and the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) to launch the decade.Advertisementhttps://7a0e820c5dc488740c9bb351c94961dd.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

Humans are using about 1.6 times the resources that nature can sustainably renew every year and the UN said short-term economic gains are being prioritised over the health of the planet. The rallying cry calls on all parts of society to take action, including governments, businesses and citizens, to restore and rewild urban areas, grasslands, savannahs and marine areas.

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In Black Rock Forest, just north of New York City, Angie Patterson aims a shotgun at a northern red oak tree. Patterson is a plant ecophysiologist, and the leaves that she’s shooting out of the canopy will give her data to understand how and why trees migrate.

Trees have been on the move since at least the last ice age. As their native habitats become inhospitable, tree ranges shift, slowly, to areas they can thrive. But climate change is disrupting the process, scientists say. As of 2019, the IUCN Red List categorized more than 20,000 tree species as threatened, and upward of 1,400 as critically endangered.

As scientists scramble to learn more about what drives tree migration, others are planning for the future. To preserve biodiversity, both citizens and researchers are employing interventionist tactics once steeped in controversy like “assisted migration” — taking tree seedlings and planting them in new locations. Rising global temperatures may force wildlife agencies and forest managers to decide what to save and what to leave behind.

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Zombie forest fires are on the rise.

According to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature, fires in far northern forests that smolder throughout the wet, cold winters and pop up again in the spring could become more common because of climate change. That presents challenges — but also opportunities — for fire management, and for minimizing the release of greenhouse gases, the researchers say.

Most of us think of forest fires as being contained within a single year. And for the most part, they are. But in the Arctic-boreal forests of Alaska, Siberia, Canada’s Northwest Territories and similar landscapes, fires can burn deep into the carbon-rich soil where they linger and lurk, often undetected.

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These large, long-lived trees support more life forms than any other trees in North America. And they’re magnificent.

When I arrived years ago at the piece of land I now garden, I saw it as a blank canvas and set about madly planting things, imagining my efforts would bring every square foot to life. I did not understand then that the heavy lifting had already been done — and probably by some blue jay, or maybe a squirrel.

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David Lowry was impatient for the very old seeds to wake up. For days, Dr. Lowry, an associate professor of botany at Michigan State University, had entered a basement room at the school, peeked into the growth chamber and seen only dirt.

But on April 23, he checked again and there it was: A tiny plant, its two leaves reaching upward. “It was kind of an amazing moment,” he said.

This was no average springtime sprout. Back in 1879, the botanist William James Beal plucked that seed and thousands of others from different weedy plants in and around East Lansing, Mich. He then stashed them in bottles and buried them in a secret spot on the Michigan State campus, with the goal of learning whether they’d still grow after years, decades or even centuries of dormancy. In mid-April, Dr. Lowry and four colleagues sneaked out under cover of night to dig one of the bottles up and plant its contents, thus continuing one of the longest-running experiments in the world.

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In early 2016, Giovanni Melcarne, an agronomist and the owner of an extra virgin olive oil farm in Gagliano del Capo, walked through the southern Italian countryside of Puglia. He was with a fellow olive oil farmer who had called and told him there was something he had to see.

The two approached a centuries-old olive tree growing at the edge of the street along a traditional stone wall. All around, the old olive trees that covered the red clay were either dead or in an advanced state of decay, filling the landscape with an unnatural greyness. Melcarne was not surprised: At least 2 million olive trees in Puglia looked this way, including many of his own.

The cause of the blight was Xylella fastidiosa, a bacteria that researchers believe arrived around 2010 from Latin America, possibly from Costa Rica on an imported ornamental plant. Today, Xylella has infected at least one-third of the 60 million olive trees in Puglia, which produces 12 percent of the world’s olive oil. The bacteria leaves no chance of survival: Once a plant is infected, it’s doomed to die in a handful of years. Today, Xylella is spreading fast across Puglia, crossing into other Italian regions and Mediterranean countries, and upending the production of olives and olive oil, the symbols of the Mediterranean.

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For decades, Walter Acree operated a modest landscaping business in Deerfield Beach, Fla. A self-described rebel, he mowed lawns in his bare feet, his then-long hair falling around his shoulders. Then, a few years ago, he stumbled into a lucrative niche business: helping South Florida’s superrich find trophy trees—the latest in status symbols for the most well-off Americans.

“I’m kind of unique,” said Mr. Acree, now the owner of Green Integrity’s, a tree relocation and landscaping firm. “Not a lot of people do what I do.”

Mr. Acree, 61, a so-called tree broker, regularly drives his wealthy clients around South Florida in search of the perfect tree for their garden, whether it is a giant kapok, an enormous canopied oak, a baobab, a ficus or a banyan. Together, they scope out trees in other people’s gardens and outside local businesses, then approach the owners with an unsolicited offer.

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(Featured image from NC Wetlands.)

Trekking out to my research sites near North Carolina’s Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, I slog through knee-deep water on a section of trail that is completely submerged. Permanent flooding has become commonplace on this low-lying peninsula, nestled behind North Carolina’s Outer Banks. The trees growing in the water are small and stunted. Many are dead.

Throughout coastal North Carolina, evidence of forest die-off is everywhere. Nearly every roadside ditch I pass while driving around the region is lined with dead or dying trees.

As an ecologist studying wetland response to sea level rise, I know this flooding is evidence that climate change is altering landscapes along the Atlantic Coast. It’s emblematic of environmental changes that also threaten wildlife, ecosystems and local farms and forestry businesses.

Like all living organisms, trees die. But what is happening here is not normal. Large patches of trees are dying simultaneously, and saplings aren’t growing to take their place. And it’s not just a local issue: seawater is raising salt levels in coastal woodlands along the entire Coastal Plain, from Maine to Florida. Huge swaths of contiguous forest are dying. They’re now known in the scientific community as “ghost forests”.

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The blooming of the East Asian Cherry tree is a major springtime tourist attraction in Washington, D.C. and in cities across Japan. But this year the beautiful hues of pink and white came earlier than normal, and in some parts of Japan, blossoms peaked at the earliest point on the calendar in more than 1,200 years.

That’s according to a new study released in Japan which looked at documents dating back to the year 812 kept in the city of Kyoto. That’s where this year, the brief window of time when blossoms were at their peak, occurred on March 26th.  That makes for the city’s earliest peak bloom in the long trail of records dating back centuries upon centuries.  

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Deep in the former royal forest of Bercé, in France’s Loire region, a 230-year-old tree comes crashing to the ground with thunderous intensity.

Just a sapling during the French Revolution, the 65-foot-tall oak tree is one of many being felled as part of ongoing efforts to rebuild Notre Dame.

The tree eventually will join 1,000 other oaks being used to reconstruct the wooden lattice of the roof and replace the base of the fallen spire engulfed by the blaze that devastated the Gothic building almost two years ago, in April 2019.”We know it’s the end of something, but it’s also the beginning,” said Pauline Delord, a 15th-generation forest guardian responsible for protecting and managing the forest.

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If a tree could talk, what might it say?

Would it plead for rain in a drought? Fawn over a neighbor’s foliage? Crack jokes about how fast another tree loses its leaves in fall?

It seems unlikely anyone will ever come across a loquacious linden. But for the arbor-curious, a red oak at the Harvard Forest in Petersham has been tweeting as @awitnesstree since July 17, 2019. Outfitted with sensors and cameras, and programmed with code that allows it to string together posts with prewritten bits of text, the Harvard Forest Witness Tree has been sharing on-the-ground insights into its own environmental life and that of its forest.

Already renowned in certain circles as the subject of the popular climate-change book “Witness Tree” by Lynda Mapes, the century-old oak’s social-media debut was the brainchild of Harvard Forest postdoctoral fellow Tim Rademacher and is now a team effort with Clarisse Hart, who heads outreach and education for the forest. Its online presence is modeled after similar “twittering” trees that chronicle their life experiences as part of a tree-water and carbon-monitoring network based in Europe called TreeWatch.net.

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Experts have made an “extraordinary” discovery of a tree which is still intact after being petrified by a volcanic eruption 20 million years ago in Lesbos, Greece.

Lesbos’ Petrified Forest was created 20 million years ago when a volcano exploded in the island’s north, covering the entire area with ash and lava. The area, which spans 15,000 hectares, is renowned for its vivid and colorful fossilized tree trunks.

Nickolas Zouros, a professor of geology at the University of the Aegean, had been excavating the fossilized forest ecosystem but told CNN he had never before uncovered such a find.

“We have a lot of findings over these years but the latest ones are the most important — really extraordinary,” he told CNN on Thursday.

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What if you were surrounded by tea and didn’t know it? In an age where tea is the most consumed drink on the planet after water and is expected to become an $81.6bn global industry by 2026, the possibility of living among an endless supply of ready-to-be-picked, wild tea might seem like a far-fetched dream. But across large swaths of the southern United States, such a reality exists.

For those who know what to look for, what was once the most widely consumed caffeinated beverage in the Americas comes from a plant growing in plain sight, ignored by most, but deeply rooted in history and intrigue.

Yaupon (pronounced yō-pon), is a holly bush indigenous to the southeast United States and happens to be North America’s only known native caffeinated plant.

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On a rolling granite hill in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, on a hot August night, tree scientist Kristen Shive camped beneath a giant sequoia tree she estimated could be a thousand years old.

Her employer, the nonprofit Save the Redwoods League, had just bought the property on which the tree stood, a 530-acre forest outside Sequoia National Park packed with ancient trees. Plans for how to preserve them spun through her head as she stared up at the stars through the tree’s frilly foliage.

A few months later, in October, she stood ankle-deep in ash at the foot of that same tree. But this time, the foliage overhead was charred to a crisp.

This giant sequoia—and likely hundreds of others—had fallen victim to an intense fire that swept over 174,000 acres of the western Sierra.

It was just one of more than 9,000 fires that scorched more than four million acres of California in 2020, a horrifying and record-breaking year. Fires burned through homes and oak forests, grasslands and pines—and also through huge patches of giant sequoias and their close cousins, the coast redwoods, respectively the most massive and the tallest trees on Earth.

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England’s New Forest is home to trees that bear the marks of more than 500 years of human activity. Known as arborglyphs, the etchings range from charms against evil that may have been carved during Shakespeare’s time to much more recent initials and dates.

Visitors from around the world can now explore the glen virtually via a free digital display, including an interactive map showing where specific carvings were found, reports BBC News.

One common type of graffiti seen in the forest is the “King’s Mark,” an arrowhead-shaped symbol used by the Royal Navy to identify beeches and oaks slated for use in shipbuilding. Some of the trees bearing the sign were spared from the ax after Great Britain shifted to using iron and steel for its warships in the early 19th century. Other carvings show eagles, boats, houses and faces.

A number of trees display concentric circles identified as “witches’ marks.” Per Historic England, the signs were probably intended to ward off evil spirits. Researchers have found witches’ marks—which often take the form of double “VV” carvings—at locations all over the country, including caves, barns, churches and inns. Most were made between the 16th and early 19th centuries.

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The 2021 RVA EFF is fast approaching and planning is nearly complete. This year’s festival will take place from February 12^th– 26^th and is completely virtual and free to the community. Our all-volunteer film committee has gathered more than 20 stunning, powerful and impactful films to screen for the RVA community.

The world premiere of the feature-length film Frozen Obsession kicks off the festival with a panel discussion to follow. The film is a visually stunning and historically poignant expedition through a dramatically changing Arctic aboard the Icebreaker Oden. The expedition included scientists, historians, journalists, education professionals, and college students, including several from Virginia Commonwealth University. The panel includes director and producer David Clark, Donglai Gong of Virginia Institute of Marine Science, and the VCU students who were part of the expedition.

Other unique aspects of the festival include the Virginia Environmental Film Contest (winning films awarded and screened February 14, beginning at 4:05 p.m.) and a film for children, Microplastic Madness, which documents 56 fifth graders from Brooklyn whose actions on plastic pollution morph into extraordinary leadership and scalable victories. Don’t miss Into the Okavango from National Geographic Documentary Films, which documents a 1,500-mile expedition across three countries and shows the effects of increasing pressure from human activity. The Okavango River Basin and the Okavango Delta, one of our planet’s last wetland wildernesses, provide a vital source of water to people, African elephants, lions, cheetahs, and hundreds of species of birds.

Registration is required for all films. To see the schedule, view trailers, and register please click here RVAEFF.org.

“Our overblown intellectual faculties seem to be telling us both that we are eternal and that we are not,” philosopher Stephen Cave observed in his poignant meditation on our mortality paradox And yet we continue to long for the secrets of that ever-elusive eternity.

For nearly a decade, Brooklyn-based artist, photographer, and Guggenheim Fellow Rachel Sussman has been traveling the globe to discover and document its oldest organisms — living things over 2,000 years of age. Her breathtaking photographs and illuminating essays are now collected in The Oldest Living Things in the World (public library) — beautiful and powerful work at the intersection of fine art, science, and philosophy, spanning seven continents and exploring issues of deep time, permanence and impermanence, and the interconnectedness of life.

With an artist’s gift for “aesthetic force” and a scientist’s rigorous respect for truth, Sussman straddles a multitude of worlds as she travels across space and time to unearth Earth’s greatest stories of resilience, stories of tragedy and triumph, past and future, but above all stories that humble our human lives, which seem like the blink of a cosmic eye against the timescales of these ancient organisms — organisms that have unflinchingly witnessed all of our own tragedies and triumphs, our wars and our revolutions, our holocausts and our renaissances, and have remained anchored to existence more firmly than we can ever hope to be. And yet a great many of these species are on the verge of extinction, in no small part due to human activity, raising the question of how our seemingly ephemeral presence in the ecosystem can have such deep and long-term impact on organisms far older and far more naturally resilient than us.

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DELAWARE, OHIO—On a weekday morning in August, just one pickup truck sat in the sprawling visitors’ parking lot here at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA’s) Forestry Sciences Laboratory. A decadeslong decline in research funding had been slowly quieting the place—and then came the pandemic.

But in a narrow strip of grass behind a homely, 1960s-era building, forest geneticist Jennifer Koch was overseeing a hive of activity. A team of seven technicians, researchers, and students—each masked and under their own blue pop-up tent—were systematically dissecting 3-meter-tall ash trees in a strange sort of arboreal disassembly line. Over 5 weeks, the researchers would take apart some 400 saplings, peeling wood back layer by layer in search of the maggotlike larvae of the emerald ash borer (Agrilus planipennis), the most devastating insect ever to strike a North American tree. Since the Asian beetle was first discovered in Michigan in 2002, it has killed hundreds of millions of ash trees across half the continent and caused tens of billions of dollars of damage.

“We have contests for who can successfully pull out the smallest larvae and the biggest larvae,” Koch says. “People get pretty excited and competitive about it. You have to do something, because it is very tedious—and [the larvae] are really gross.”

The larvae kill ash trees by burrowing into them to feed on bark and, fatally, the thin, pipelike tissues that transport water and nutrients. They then transform into iridescent green beetles about the size of a grain of rice that fly off to attack other trees. Dead larvae excite Koch and her team the most. Those finds signal trees that, through genetic luck, can kill emerald ash borers, rather than the other way around. Such rare resistant trees could ultimately help Koch achieve her ambitious goal: using time-tested plant-breeding techniques to create ash varieties that can fend off the borer and reclaim their historic place in North American forests.

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Having street trees closer to your home may reduce the risk of depression and the need for antidepressants, research has shown.

Multiple studies already show that mental health can be strongly impacted by environment so a German research team tried to assess if everyday objects people engage with – such as trees dotted along the pavement – could have a positive impact.

They analysed data from 10,000 residents of Leipzig, Germany, and found a correlation between the amount of street trees and antidepressants prescribed to a patient.

A larger amount of trees less than 100 metres from someone’s home was associated with a lower risk of having antidepressants, the researchers said.

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Have you ever been to Pony Pasture and wondered about that patch of land in the middle of the James? It’s just downriver from Huguenot Flatwater, and well before the Powhite overpass.

That’s Williams Island.

Williams Island is just under 100-acres, and has no land access. It’s an actual island – get it? Because of this, it’s sort of a microcosm of what a natural James River Park would look like. Over the years, people have documented the abundant wildlife of Williams Island. They’ve seen every sort of bird you could imagine, deer, foxes, and even the occasional black bear.

But what of the plant life?

Throughout 2020, folks from VHB used funding from the James River and Tuckahoe Garden Clubs to try and catalog all of the plant life on Williams Island. You would think that would be simple. “Oak tree, maple, grass, shrub…” But what KIND of oak? What sort of grass? Which type of shrub?

Click here to read more about Williams Island from the Friends of the James River Park…

IN THE FISHLAKE NATIONAL FOREST in Utah, a giant has lived quietly for the past 80,000 years.

The Trembling Giant, or Pando, is an enormous grove of quaking aspens that take the “forest as a single organism” metaphor and makes it literal: the grove really is a single organism. Each of the approximately 47,000 or so trees in the grove is genetically identical and all the trees share a single root system. While many trees spread through flowering and sexual reproduction, quaking aspens usually reproduce asexually, by sprouting new trees from the expansive lateral root of the parent. The individual trees aren’t individuals but stems of a massive single clone, and this clone is truly massive. “Pando” is a Latin word that translates to “I spread.”

Spanning 107 acres and weighing 6,615 tons, Pando was once thought to be the world’s largest organism (now usurped by thousand-acre fungal mats in Oregon), and is almost certainly the most massive. In terms of other superlatives, the more optimistic estimates of Pando’s age have it as over one million years old, which would easily make it one of the world’s oldest living organisms. Some of the trees in the forest are over 130 years old.

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DESOTO NATIONAL FOREST, Miss. — When European settlers came to North America, fire-dependent savannas anchored by lofty pines with footlong needles covered much of what became the southern United States.

Yet by the 1990s, logging and clear-cutting for farms and development had all but eliminated longleaf pines and the grasslands beneath where hundreds of plant and animal species flourished.

Now, thanks to a pair of modern day Johnny Appleseeds, landowners, government agencies and nonprofits are working in nine coastal states from Virginia to Texas to bring back pines named for the long needles prized by Native Americans for weaving baskets.

Longleaf pines now cover as much as 7,300 square miles (19,000 square kilometers) — and more than one-quarter of that has been planted since 2010.

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Have you ever noticed a blooming dogwood in the spring? Relaxed in the shade of a spreading oak on a hot day? Stayed dry under the canopy of a leafy tree during an unexpected downpour? Day in and day out, trees quietly lend a hand in our communities without us giving it much thought.

The list of benefits tree canopies provide is vast — mitigating local flooding, filtering air pollution, reducing polluted runoff, cooling areas prone to extreme heat, creating homes for wildlife, taking carbon out of the atmosphere and more.

Trees are a simple and effective tool to make Virginia neighborhoods more livable while providing a cost-effective option to address environmental concerns. In the upcoming General Assembly session, Virginia legislators should help cities and counties expand those efforts.

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A new assessment of Europe’s remaining old-growth forests – the pockets of undisturbed ancient woodland where humans have had minimal impact – reveals they are in a “perilous state” and lack proper protections.

Scientists from 28 institutions have gathered data and detailed mapping over five years in order to assess the conservation status of these primary forests in Europe, and found many of them continue to be logged.

The research paper describes primary forests as being “composed of native species, where signs of past human use are minimal, and ecological processes, such as natural disturbances, operate dynamically and with little impairment by anthropogenic influences”.

They are critical for conserving forest biodiversity and provide important ecosystem services, such as carbon storage and natural water course management which can help maintain resilient environments.

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Foresters once regarded trees as solitary individuals: They competed for space and resources, but were otherwise indifferent to one another.

The work of the Canadian ecologist Suzanne Simard upended that. She found that while there is indeed conflict in a forest, there is also negotiation, reciprocity and even selflessness.

Ms. Simard discovered that underground fungal threads link nearly every tree in a forest. Seedlings severed from this network are more likely to die; chemical alarm signals to warn of danger can be passed between trees; and a dying tree can sometimes pass on a share of its carbon to neighbors.

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