Pact protects Canadian forests: Nature Newsan unlikely coalition of logging companies and environmental groups has reached an agreement to protect more than 300,000 square kilometres of Canadian boreal forest an area larger than the United kingdom the biggest forest
-conservation deal in history. An additional 385,000 square kilometres will fall under strict guidelines that will promote sustainable logging
Under the agreement, unveiled on 18 may in Toronto, Ontario, 21 members of the Forest Products Association of Canada,
says Avrim Lazar, president of the Forest Products Association. The finer details of areas to be preserved (see'Protection plan')will be chosen by biologists and logging companies.
This will allow us to protect the most intact parts of the boreal forest that are critical habitat for the caribou and other species
this week's agreement means that 1. 6 million square kilometres of Canada's boreal forest will be off-limits to logging,
which will make it the largest area of protected forest in the world. This is good news for caribou,
given mounting evidence that boreal forests are important carbon stores. Protecting these forests and their soil,
which has enormous amounts of carbon, is a hugely important step forward, says Stuart Pimm, a conservation ecologist at Duke university in Durham, North carolina,
Unlike tropical forests, which constantly recycle atmospheric carbon through phases of growth and decay, boreal forests experience less decay and instead tend to pool carbon in soil and peat.
A recent study led by Sebastiaan Luyssaert, a biologist at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, found that mature boreal forests remain active carbon sinks rather than becoming carbon-neutral ecosystems as they mature (S. Luyssaert et al.
Nature 455 213-215; 2008). ) As long as they're alive, they keep accumulating carbon, says Luyssaert.
which includes most of the boreal forests earmarked for protection, contains approximately 50%of the estimated global belowground organic carbon pool,
But Werner Kurz, a senior researcher at the Canadian Forest Service in Victoria, British columbia, isn't sure that forest conservation is going to slow down warming.
it's not clear that intact forests will necessarily be more resilient than well-managed ones,
harvesting old-growth trees and replacing them with seeds obtained from warmer climes can produce trees that will better withstand temperature increases,
We're still not sure exactly how useful these forests are going to be in mitigating global warming,
says Hank Margolis, a forest ecosystem scientist at Laval University in Quebec city, who heads the Canadian Carbon Program.
The forests may fare better than the research programmes. For years the Canadian government has declined to renew funding for the Canadian Foundation for Climate
For example, Brian Belcher, director of the Centre for Non-Timber Resources at Canada's Royal roads University in Victoria
British columbia, presented the results of a project that has been assessing the contribution of non-timber forest products (such as food
has so far found that forest products contribute an average of a quarter of local people's income,
Belcher explains that most forest products are readily available to poor people because they have a low economic value.
Higher value forest products tend to require more work or equipment to gather and are taken therefore by people who are already more affluent and able to make an investment in the resources they need to exploit the forest.
In the short term, he adds, conservation projects can actually limit people's access to forest resources by rendering their normal methods of gathering food illegal,
These included projects on marine tourism mangrove restoration and agroforestry. But more often, the team found, projects had little or no economic benefit for the poorest people.
which keeps carbon sequestered in native soils, savannahs and forests (J. A. Burney et al. Proc.
The notion that increasing crop yields preserves forests and other native lands dates back to the father of the green revolution, the late US plant scientist Norman Borlaug,
where they were tested for Ross River and Barmah Forest viruses. VIRAL RNA was found on the cards and in the mosquitoes that fed on the cards.
Forest pledge: At a climate conference in Oslo on 27 may, some 50 countries agreed to a loose framework for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions caused by deforestation.
what it could reveal about the fate of the world's largest tropical forest, a major carbon storehouse.
have showed consistently that the forest is sensitive to drying. A 2009 analysis of ground plots4 found decreased growth and increased tree death from the 2005 drought,
how the forest responds to rising atmospheric carbon dioxide. By easing the burden of CO2 uptake,
But in the Northern hemisphere, fertilization experiments which involve pumping tonnes of CO2 into forest plots indicate that the effect is limited by the availability of nutrients such as nitrogen.
Many countries have sustainable forestry laws, but illegal logging thrives wherever corruption, chaos and political apathy are found regardless of what laws are on the books.
Wood products made from illegal timber are consumed often in Europe, Japan and the United states. In these regions,
In 2008, the United states banned imports of illegally harvested timber. This year, the European parliament voted in similar rules on 7 july.
But even a total end to illegal timber imports wouldn't solve the problem, as the contraband would likely find its way to less sensitive markets,
Before illegal wood arrives at consumer countries, it often passes through China or Vietnam. The report concludes that stricter enforcement at these processing countries is needed badly.
In Cameroon, donor countries insisted that an independent observer of forests be installed. Brazil has been cracking down on illegal logging for years
Doug Boucher, director of the Tropical forest and Climate Initiative at the Union of Concerned Scientists in WASHINGTON DC, says that the key figure in the report is the $2. 50-per-tonne cost of avoiding emissions.
Patrick Gonzalez, a forestry scientist currently visiting at University of California, Berkeley, says that reducing illegal logging can be considered a kind of REDD programme the acronym, popular in climate-negotiation circles,
stands for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. The reduction in illegal logging that they report has achieved already the kind of results that REDD programmes are trying to achieve,
and control enforcement of logging rules paired with schemes that give the responsibility for and the revenues from a forest to local people.
People will take care of forest resources when they have a stake in the state of the forest,
he says. You need both enforcement-and community-based programmes. Gonzalez adds a caveat to that attractive $2. 50-per-tonne figure:
Nature Newsthe colour of her historic, red wood villa on the Bosporus waterfront in Istanbul may be fading,
as she saw that the goats were destroying the pine forests. In the beginning, the villagers wanted to kill us,
Claims of growth in India's forests'misleading':'Nature Newsnative forests in India are disappearing at a rate of up to 2. 7%per year.
The figures, published in an analysis of the country's forest cover, stand in stark contrast to those of a 2009 survey by an Indian governmental organization,
which said that forests have expanded by 5%over the past decade. India is among the most densely forested countries in the world,
and in 2008 the government announced goals to increase forest cover by nearly 10%by 2012.
The India State of Forest Report 2009 by the Forest Survey of India (FSI) indicated that the outlook was good.
says that while the figures showing that forest cover in India has grown are technically correct,
We found a very real and serious loss of native forest, he says, adding that it could put India ahead of most other countries in terms of deforestation.
to provide timber and fuel wood and in some cases to earn money from selling carbon credits under the Clean Development Mechanism established in 2001 as part of the Kyoto Protocol.
The country now ranks second globally in terms of total land area under plantation. Laurance says that much of India's claimed growth in forest cover has come from plantations,
and that this is masking a fall in native forests. The Indian government has made a big deal of increasing forest cover.
But they are not distinguishing between natural and artificial forests he says. This is bad for the environment
because replanting native forests with nonnative trees damages local biodiversity, says Neil Burgess, a conservation biologist at the University of Copenhagen.
Most plantations of nonnative trees have very low biological value. They are only good to store carbon,
he says. This distinction between native and nonnative trees is important for an accurate picture of the state of the world's forests,
says Laurance. In the analysis, the researchers assessed data on the growth in Indian plantations collected for the Food
The researchers subtracted the rates of plantation expansion from the growth in total forest cover as measured by remote-sensing imagery,
The researchers checked these figures against changes in forest biovolume (the volume of wood and other aboveground forest material),
They found a loss in native forest biovolume of around 2. 7%per year. Laurance says that some assessments of forest cover
such as that carried out by the FAO, do not distinguish between native forests and plantations.
They rely on relatively coarse data from sources including the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric administration's Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer satellites,
But the Indian Remote Sensing satellites used by the FSI have a much higher resolution up to 23.5 square metres per pixel so the agency has the means to distinguish native forests from plantations of nonnative trees.
Laurance says he is hopeful that the United nations'REDD+initiative to reduce carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation
and sustainable management of forests will encourage India and other countries in similar situations to distinguish between native and artificial forests,
and pay more attention to protecting the former. He says that countries such as Norway the programme's first and largest donor will be interested more in paying to stop deforestation of native forests than in expanding plantations.
Bhaskar Vira, an environmental economist at the University of Cambridge, UK, says that he thinks there is probably some truth in the study's finding.
Because the authors subtracted the FAO figures for the total area covered by plantations from a satellite-based estimate of total forest cover
but points out that the calculations of loss in biovolume used Forest Survey of India data.
More than 300,000 hectares of forest, vegetation and peat land have burned since the fires began in June.
The GFMC says that more than 15 million hectares of forest and vegetative land have burned in fires in the Russian Federation already this year.
and forests usually regrow quickly after them. So why the fuss? The current fires are burning in more urban areas,
The forests will grow back naturally, says Goldammer, but it will take a long time, particularly for the slower-growing trees such as spruce (Picea).
Legislation passed in January 2007 decentralized the management of the forests to local regions. Goldammer says that the authorities there have not taken adequate responsibility for managing
and protecting the forests and peat lands, and that investments in fire management have not been made.
That could prevent the forests from growing back and the area will turn to grassland and so be even more vulnerable to wildfires,
but during a drought, fires that are set to clear smaller plots are more likely to escape into the forest.
) Wood burnt at above 500 °C produces calcite, although the mineral can also come from limestone slaked to make lime for construction,
or chunks of burnt wood found in a particular layer actually originated elsewhere, making them useless for dating neighbouring samples.
says Jianchu Xu, an ethnoecologist at the World Agroforestry Centre in Kunming, China, and a professor at the Kunming Institute of Botany of the Chinese Academy of Sciences,
such as the US Forest Service or Fish and Wildlife Service, says Cameron, also a conference organizer.
and probability distributions, says Chris E. Forest, a statistician at Pennsylvania State university, we have to resort to concepts like odds, rolls of the dice, roulette wheels.
and the woodland strawberry. Earlier this year, a team backed by food giant Mars unveiled a preliminary sequence of the cacao tree Theobroma cacao.
The genome of the woodland strawberry, also known as the wild or alpine strawberry, is published also today in Nature Genetics2.
'According to figures from the Global Fire Monitoring Centre (GFMC), based at the University of Freiburg in Germany and part of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, around 7 million hectares including 800,000 hectares of forest,
A second set of towers will be used to conduct detailed chemistry experiments focused on forest emissions
with the savanna elephant weighing around 7 tonnes roughly double the weight of the forest elephant.
But studies had suggested they were the same species DNA in mitochondria (the cell's energy factories) from African elephants found evidence of interbreeding between forest and savanna elephants around 500,000 years ago2.
By comparing all these genomes, the team found that the forest and savanna elephants diverged into separate species between 2. 6 and 5. 6 million years ago.
But this study really hammers the coffin shut on any arguments that the forest and savannah are anything but different species,
MITOCHONDRIAL DNA evidence suggesting that forest and savanna elephants interbred recently and had shared a recent female ancestor can be explained as a result of the female elephant's social behaviour,
Herds of female forest elephants could have repeatedly come into contact and bred with migrating male savanna elephants.
the forest elephant gene pool would become diluted and displaced by that of the savanna elephants,
but the forest DNA would be conserved in the MITOCHONDRIAL DNA, which is passed on through the female line.
The forest elephants should become a greater conservation priority, the study says.
Tide turns against corn ethanol: Nature Newsbuffeted by the economic crisis and a drop in the oil price,
The conference also reached a historic agreement on forest protection, and advanced programmes to help the developing world adopt clean energy
and forest degradation (known as REDD) and augmenting the carbon stocks locked up in forests. Collectively, the programme is called REDD-plus.
establish a baseline for historic emissions from forest loss and create a system for monitoring their forests.
Just as importantly, says John Niles, director of the Tropical forest Group in San diego California, the agreement calls on an existing technical body to look into the programme rules
and requirements and then report back within a year. Once we have those requirements, then everybody knows what we have to get to before any money changes hands,
Events Tracking forests by satellite Google unveiled its much-anticipated'Earth Engine'at climate talks in Canc  n, Mexico, last week.
A forest-cover map of Mexico is pictured. The platform was developed to work with satellite software used by researchers such as Greg Asner, an environmental scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, California,
who has developed a way to help tropical countries assess their forests quickly and cheaply. See go. nature. com/w9iqke for more.
and a range of other factors that would have economic impacts such as forestry and biodiversity loss.
Nature Newsas Malaysia prepares to convert around 7, 000 hectares of forest into an oil-palm plantation,
The ten-yearlong Stability of Altered Forest Ecosystems project will be launched on 29 january in the forests of the Maliau Basin on the island of Borneo,
and the resources and processes provided by the ecosystem as the forest is logged and replanted with oil palms.
For instance, the project will look at which animal species survive in a forest as the level of logging intensifies until the land is converted fully into an oil-palm plantation.
They will also study how patches of conserved forest totalling 750 hectares contribute to the environmental effects of the logging.
and decided to convert the forest into an oil-palm plantation to bring in extra income, says Ewers.
and has agreed to collaborate on the project by conserving the patches of forest. A main aim of the study is to develop guidelines on how to design
We want to use the data to optimally design future forest clearance for agricultural income and biodiversity.
and that attention now needs to be paid to the remaining unprotected forests that are going to be exploited.
whether to extend the run of the Large Hadron Collider to the end of 2012 in search of the Higgs boson. go. nature. com/udrnvx 24 jan 4 feb The ninth session of the United nations Forum on Forests Â
¢â which officially kicks off the International Year of Forests, 2011 ¢â takes place at the UN headquarters in New york. go. nature. com/potx5i Number crunch 18%The number of health advocacy groups receiving funding from Eli lilly in the first
but this would of course be at the expense of pastures and forests, which are a reservoir of biodiversity and carbon,
Wetland plants and forests act as carbon sinks, locking away substantial amounts of carbon absorbed from the atmosphere.
and livelihoods of millions of people who live in tropical forests, according to a report launched in London on 8 february.
found a disturbing tendency of some governments to roll back hard-won local land rights as forests become more valuable.
Year of forests The United nations (UN) launched its International Year of Forests in New york on 2 february.
the Food and agriculture organization of the UN in Rome released a biennial assessment of global forests issues.
State of the World's Forests 2011 says that the rate of deforestation has slowed in the past decade,
The report emphasizes that local communities'knowledge about managing forests should be taken into account in top-down efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions from deforestation.
Canadian forest deal at risk: Nature Newsfor conservationists, the promise seems almost too good to be true
The Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement, a deal between the forestry industry and environmental groups, aims to set aside nearly 30 million hectares of northern wilderness and subject a further 42 million to strict tree
2010), it would be the single biggest forest-protection deal ever, and has been portrayed by participants as a model of cooperation.
president of the Forest Products Association of Canada in Ottawa, lauded former antagonists for working together on how to meet the needs of humanity without trashing the environment, our own nest.
With timber companies reluctant to forgo extensive logging rights, and environmentalists adamant that far-reaching protections must be enforced,
questions remain over how much forest will actually be preserved. Meanwhile, Canadian aboriginal groups, who were left out of the deal-making process,
says Lorne Johnson, co-chairman of the Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement's secretariat in Ottawa,
Under the agreement, 21 forestry companies and 9 environmental groups are discussing ways to preserve large sections of Canada's northern forest a big storehouse of carbon and a crucial habitat for the threatened woodland caribou
The companies that hold the rights to log roughly one-quarter of Canada's boreal forest have agreed to discuss giving them up in some unspecified areas;
In the other track, a three-man panel of forestry auditors is developing new harvesting standards for the remainder of the land.
which include better mimicking of the natural cycles of forest regeneration through fire and insects, would make the wood produced there the most environmentally preferable in the world,
said Steven Kallick, director of the International Boreal Conservation Campaign of the Pew Environment Group in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, at the Washington briefing.
Richard brooks, forests campaign coordinator at Greenpeace Canada in Toronto who also spoke at the Washington meeting,
But Fran §ois Dumoulin, forestry director of Abitibibowater in Montreal, one of Canada's largest wood products companies and an industry participant in the agreement, rejects that interpretation.
and others who are tied economically to the forest, such as trappers and tourism organizations. But some forestry companies oppose that approach,
saying that it infringes on their flexibility, and no decision has yet been taken as to whether people will be included in the agreement's standards.
signalling a major obstacle to the deal in portions of the boreal forest for which aboriginal communities have jurisdiction.
Fruit-feasting fish fertilize faraway forests: Nature Newsmassive Amazonian characid fish may carry seeds more than five kilometres across forest flood plains,
Fish help to spread forest seeds. In some areas populations have declined by 90, %says Anderson.
A lot of the species were spreading into the forest, he says. Hulme first looked at the 34 plants on an International Union for Conservation of Nature list of 100 of the worst invasive species. For 19 of the 34,
Nature Newsup to 6%of carbon-rich peat-swamp forests had been cleared in Peninsular Malaysia and on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra to make way for oil-palm plantations by the early 2000s,
At least some of the expansion has been at the expense of cleared forests, including peat-swamp forests.
Like most forests, peat-swamp forests store large amounts of carbon above ground as biomass
and this is lost when the forest is cleared. They also store large amounts of carbon in their soils,
as dead organic matter decomposes slowly under marshy conditions. Draining peatlands to create agricultural land oxidizes the soil and releases large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
For the first 25 years after an oil-palm plantation is established in a peat-swamp forest,
only 6%was on peat-forest soil. This might be because peatlands are low in nutrients
and in Peninsular Malaysia, 38%,35%and 27%,respectively, of peat-swamp forest had been converted to oil-palm plantations by the early 2000s.
And a quarter to a third of global greenhouse-gas emissions are the result of land-use change in forests,
Peat-swamp forests are home to a number of endemic species, some of which have been affected by the changes, according to the new study.
including water, forest or plantation. Given the rather coarse resolution of that satellite data, only large palm-oil plantations with closed canopies are easily identifiable,
because the planting of oil palms accelerated rapidly after 2002 together with forest clearance, although the two have not been correlated as in this study.
he says, pointing to a recent study on loss of forest cover in Indonesia4. A previous attempt at quantifying peat-forest conversion to oil-palm planting was made by the nonprofit organization Wetlands International for the Malaysian state of Sarawak on Borneo.
nearly 33%of the peat-swamp forests in the state had been cleared, more than half for oil palms.
Forest mission India will spend 460 billion rupees (US$10 billion) over a decade planting new forests
and improving the quality of tree cover in existing forests, according to a plan approved by the Prime minister's Council on Climate Change on 23 february.
Conference in The Woodlands, near Houston, Texas. go. nature. com/eugq9g 9 13 march The 10th International Conference on Alzheimer's
Nature Newsmangrove forests in tropical regions of the Indian and Pacific oceans store more carbon than previously recognized,
The findings indicate that much of the carbon in such forests is found in the surrounding soil,
Cutting down mangrove forests, which occupy less than 1%of tropical forest area, could therefore contribute up to 10%of global carbon emissions from deforestation.
Although carbon reserves in other types of tropical wetland forest have been assessed, the amount of carbon in mangroves has been ignored largely,
even though they are present in more than 100 countries. For example, it is estimated that clearing of tropical peatlands,
The extent of mangrove forests has declined by as much as 50%over the past half century because of development, over-harvesting and aquaculture,
To estimate the abundance of carbon in mangroves, lead investigator J. Boone Kauffman, an ecologist at the Northern Research Station of the US Forest Service in Durham
They found that these forests hold much more carbon than do boreal, temperate or tropical upland forests especially in an organic-rich'muck layer'of soil more than 30 centimetres below the surface.
The team found that this underground layer is thicker in mangrove forests in estuaries than in those near the ocean
the researchers predict that worldwide carbon reserves in mangrove forests may be as high as 25%of those in tropical peatlands,
the relative area of mangrove forests in estuaries compared with those near oceans, and the effect of land-use changes on carbon release from soils.
referring to an international plan to pay developing countries to preserve forests in a bid to help reduce global carbon emissions.
Mangrove forests are important for diversity, for coastal stability and for carbon, based on this paper. It gives another justification for preserving mangrove forests.
China vows to clean up rural environment: Nature Newstackling pollution in rural areas, especially pollution from agricultural sources, will be a top priority for China in the coming years, Li Ganjie,
Nature Newsa scheme to pay people in developing countries to curb carbon emissions from deforestation is plagued by'leakage'trees that aren't cut down in one forest are just cut down in another to provide people with the resources they would have foregone.
and Forest Degradation (REDD+)programme might have an impact there. REDD+aims to provide developed countries with a cheap way to offset their carbon dioxide emissions-paying developing countries not to cut down their forests
and thereby keeping carbon in the trees. The programme is currently providing support to 13 countries,
which would include the cost of monitoring forests, would be more expensive than just paying people not to use the land US$6. 50 compared with $3. 90 per tonne of carbon dioxide saved.
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011