birds and forest-dwelling mammals were exposed to daily doses up to 100 times greater -and fish and marine algae to doses several thousand times greater-than are considered generally safe.
The soil samples used for the analysis came from a contaminated forest area 25-45 kilometres northwest of Fukushima.
Long-term surveys in the Fukushima forest zone will hopefully help us find out. Radioecologists regret that the few ecological studies done after the Chernobyl reactor meltdown 25 years ago missed out on many research opportunities
On 18 may, Brazil's National Institute for Space Research (INPE) released satellite data recording that 593 square kilometres of forest had been cleared in March and April,
At a crisis meeting, Teixeira said it was too early to tell whether the surge related to anticipated changes in legislation governing forest preservation,
But this week the country became only the fifth from Africa to sign a trade agreement with the European union to stop illegal timber exports.
The deals are meant to ensure that timber reaching Europe is sourced legally; measures include electronically tagging trees (pictured.
But none of the six countries that have signed the pacts has started yet producing licensed timber.
yet forwards products made from the wood to Europe. See go. nature. com/xwkhck for more.
Nature Newsthe European union (EU) and Liberia have signed a trade deal aimed at ending illegal exports of timber from the African country.
The United nations Security council banned timber imports from Liberia in 2003, after it was shown that the industry was being used to fund civil wars that left hundreds of thousands of people dead.
and sanctions were lifted in 2006 following the reform of the forestry sector, which included the creation of a nationwide timber tracking system.
It is hoped that the deal with the EU, known as a Voluntary Partnership Agreement (VPA could help to enforce Liberia's revamped legislation
Currently the forestry sector produces less than US$5 million in revenues, and that could grow to $50 million in the next few years,
Indonesia was the largest timber exporter and the first Asian country to sign a VPA agreement with the EU last week, after eight years of negotiations.
Illegally harvested wood accounts for around 40%of timber exports from Indonesia and around 15%of the country's exports reach the EU. A VPA is a bilateral agreement between the EU
and a wood-exporting country that aims to ensure that timber reaching European shores is legally sourced.
For Liberia, among other requirements,'legal'timber exports must be sourced from legitimate concessions that have a social agreement with local communities and pay the required government taxes and fees.
On paper, it's one of the strongest frameworks for forestry oversight in the world
Liberia hopes to get its first VPA timber in circulation by 2014, but that's a tall order.
None of the six countries with VPAS has started producing licensed timber. Ghana the first country to sign a VPA, in 2009,
hopes to get its timber on the market before 2013. This is when the EU Timber Regulation,
which requires European importers to prove that their sources are legal, comes into force. Lack of political will could also be a major stumbling block for the deal, according to Siakor.
who chaired the Panel of Experts on Liberia at the United nations Security council during the time of the timber sanctions.
Much of the wood exported to China is manufactured into wood products, and then sent on to Europe and the United states without papers.
Because of the open European market, all it takes is one country with inadequate checks to let the timber in
in February, the US Department of agriculture invested $60 million in three studies on the effects of climate change on crops and forests.
Forest and other locations around Chernobyl. In a 2007 analysis of the data from the first bird counts made in spring 2006,
what gives redheads their hair colour and Red Forest birds such as the hoopoe (Upupa epops) their distinctive palette of light browns and their orange crown feathers.
or phaeomelanin pigments on the distribution and abundance of bird species in the Red Forest.
Misconceptions about forest-dwellers overturned: Nature Newsforests are vital to the livelihoods of millions of people in developing countries,
The study provides much-needed solid evidence for the importance of forests to the world's rural poor.
that forests provide vital income to whole communities, not just the poorest, and that richer households are most likely to contribute to deforestation.
Income from forests has been undervalued largely, particularly in assessments of poverty and income such as the World bank's Living Standard Measurement Survey
an environmental economist at the Norwegian University of Life sciences in Aas and a lead author of the study by the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) based in Bogor, Indonesia.
The lack of solid evidence has led to questions over claims that forests are important to the livelihoods of poor people.
This makes the study the largest and most robust so far on the links between forests and poverty.
The researchers found that firewood accounts for around a fifth of the income that comes from forests,
with timber coming in second at 10%.%One unexpected discovery was that the poorest forest-dwelling people do not cause the bulk of deforestation.
In fact, the richest 20%of households at each study site caused 30%more deforestation than the poorest 20%.
although the poorest households are reliant on forests for their daily needs, they also look elsewhere for example,
I was surprised that poor people did not rely on forests as a safety net, says Angelsen.
Researchers hope that the data will inform policies that aim to conserve forests at the same time as reducing poverty.
welcomed the study's contribution to ensuring that forests are seen not by governments and the international community as just stocks of carbon.
it will be difficult to achieve win-win outcomes for forest conservation and poverty reduction. Attempts to protect forests can be bad news for the poor,
particularly if locals are evicted and banned from protected areas, he told the meeting. Moreover, projects attempting to address both conservation
Adams argues that forest-conservation and poverty-reduction initiatives, including the United nations'extended Reducing Emissions from Deforestation
and Forest Degradation (REDD+)scheme, will work only if they are implemented from the bottom up, with locals involved in decision-making
The CIFOR study does show examples of how forest conservation and livelihoods can be integrated, but Adams cautions that it suggests no overarching strategy for conserving biodiversity while reducing poverty.
Sustainable management of tropical forests has a long way to go: Nature Newsless than 10%of permanent tropical forests are under a sustainable management plan,
according to a study by the International Tropical Timber Organization (ITTO) an intergovernmental organization based in Yokohama, Japan,
whose 33 timber-producing members account for around 85%of the world's tropical forests. Between 2005 and 2010, the amount of land in the tropics designated as permanently forested
which must legally remain forested rather than be converted to agriculture or other land uses and under sustainable management grew from around 36 million hectares to around 53 million hectares, an increase of nearly 50%.
%But this still represents only 7%of the 761 million hectares of the permanent forest estate in ITTO member countries and only 3%of tropical forests globally.
In the mid-1980s, probably less than a million hectares of tropical forest were being managed sustainably, says Poore,
who helped the ITTO put together its first forest-status compilation in 1987. Since the ITTO's last report in 2005
though, countries such as the Democratic republic of the congo, Liberia and Nigeria have stumbled with their forestry targets because of war or lack of resources.
But other countries, such as Brazil, Gabon and Malaysia, have made real progress towards sustainable forest management, according to the report.
The report moves beyond timber production to discuss ways of reducing deforestation through financial mechanisms such as UN REDD programme (reducing emissions from deforestation
and forest degradation) the idea of paying poor countries to preserve their forests rather than cut them down.
and fuel prices could easily favour the conversion of land for agriculture and other uses over forest conservation.
head of the Tropical forest and Climate Initiative at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit organization based in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, says on a whole this shows that the ITTO is moving away from the old-fashioned mindset that timber production in permanent forest estates under a sustainable management plan at a profit could rescue tropical forests.
In Ivory coast, for example, the permanent forest estate is recorded as 4. 2 million hectares but only 1. 95 million of those are forested still.
The permanent forest estate is not a permanent solution and it is not real, says Boucher.
If something is legally a permanent forest but in reality it is not, how can you trust the data on the permanent forest estate as being anything real?
The main achievement of the report is that it is enormously comprehensive, says Poore. It is much better than in 2005,
This is especially true in quantifying the permanent forest estate he says. A table shows a substantial decrease in protected area overall,
Henri Djombo, Congo's forestry and environment minister, has emphasized the benefit of the multilateral talks
because forest management in each of the basins has particular strengths: in the Amazon basin, strong policies on community forestry and indigenous populations are in place;
there is good legislation on certified forestry concessions in the Congo Basin; and the Borneo-Mekong Basin has developed a secondary industry to process its wood.
We need to work together to promote best forest practices in the three basins. This is the main objective of the summit,
Djombo said at the official opening of the talks on 30 may. Non-governmental organizations had high hopes that the Brazzaville meeting would end in a firm pact for forest protection.
Lasse Gustavsson, head of the delegation from conservation group WWF, had called for zero net deforestation by 2020,
and forests at the moment we're in a good flow when it comes to political commitment for biodiversity and forests.
Some nations used the conference to announce new forestry plans. The Democratic Republic of congo announced its intention to protect 17%of its forests
which cover around 40%of the country up 5%on previous commitments. The Republic of congo committed to reforesting a million hectares of its land.
But poor organization before the conference made more it difficult for nations to agree on ambitious inter-country commitments for forest management across the equatorial region.
In the end only about half of the 32 countries that make up the world's three major rainforest basins sent high-level representation.
Crop production and species diversity in woodlands were among the few services that improved. Wheat yields doubled between the 1960s and 2010
The study assesses the services provided by eight habitat types across Britain including woodlands, urban environments and farmlands by assigning them a financial value.
For example, the study included a value analysis of the placement of woodlands in Wales. The factors considered included income from timber
carbon storage in the trees and soil, and recreational value. Woodlands are clustered around the Cambrian Mountains in central Wales.
The analysis shows that this location provides the greatest market value, for example, in the value of the timber.
But when non-market factors such as carbon storage are taken into account, the Cambrian Mountains are almost perfectly the wrong place to plant trees,
Nature Newsfor tropical ecologist Greg Asner, it's all about seeing the forest through its trees.
and even shotguns to gather samples of vegetation from forest canopies around the globe. They have created a digital catalogue of the chemical and optical properties of some 4, 700 plant species in different conditions.
an aircraft that will combine a state-of-the-art optical sensor with a laser capable of mapping forests in unprecedented three-dimensional detail.
The system will allow Asner to build on earlier work cataloguing forest carbon stocks in support of efforts to reduce deforestation (see'Taking stock of global carbon),
while offering insights into forest health and diversity. The team's work combines physics biochemistry and ecology, beginning with measuring subtle differences in the way the forest canopy absorbs
and reflects solar radiation. The signal varies depending on the leaves'concentrations of nutrients, minerals, pigments such as chlorophyll,
but ecologists many of whom have spent decades tramping through the jungle in muddy boots are lining up to find out.
The other is to fly over plots monitored by the Amazon Forest Inventory Network (RAINFOR) to address a nagging question:
That could change the balance of species in some forests and convert others to meadows or grasslands, says a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1.
In many parts of the western United states, especially those blanketed with conifer forests, raging wildfires are part of the landscape.
but can burn entire forests, leaving only charred stumps. The area burned is correlated strongly with low rainfall
Nakanishi is coordinating seven teams to study the impact of the disaster on soil, plants, animals, fisheries and forests for the next decade,
But a backlash in the hinterlands is threatening to weaken the country's forest code
two months before the nation's House of representatives passed a bill to change the law that governs forests,
For now, all landowners in the Amazon must maintain forest on 80%of their land,
He says that the government needs to start investing in schemes to protect forest carbon
As forest habitats are destroyed, many bats are moving into urban areas. Bats are also increasingly on people's menus because larger,
Wood agrees. I would be surprised if there was no spill over to humans, he says. We spend millions on hunting down new viruses but very little on working out
increasing fertilization and promoting the use of land-management techniques that integrate forests with agriculture.
and dissemination of efficient wood stoves in Nigeria to reduce wood demand and deforestation. Some emissions trading schemes give preference to local projects.
The report also praises Australia's Carbon Farming Initiative the world's first national legislation aimed at reducing carbon emissions from farming and forestry,
and investors to generate and trade carbon credits from farming and forestry projects, and could serve as a model for similar projects in other countries.
The wealth of information gathered will help researchers to understand how climate change is affecting forests.
and tropical forests are monitored in countries such as Brazil, China and India, in order to better understand the way that forests capture
and release carbon, one of the least understood aspects of the global carbon cycle. Earthwatch has recruited more than 2,
200 volunteers (all HSBC employees) to measure tree growth, study the decomposition of leaf litter on the forest floor
Forests play a huge role in regulating climates at global scale and provide livelihoods for many millions of people,
a forest biodiversity researcher at Imperial College London who is involved not in the Earthwatch project.
Every forest is different so well-managed and quality-controlled citizen science such as Earthwatch s programme represents a powerful way of gaining the large volumes of data that are needed to gain insight into the global patterns of forest change.
Researchers are only just beginning to analyse data from the project. But some studies, such as that in Gutianshan National Nature Reserve in Zhejiang Province, China, have confirmed already that plantations can be a haven for biodiversity."
"The number of tree species in some of the plantation forest plots approaches that of the primary forest,
He says that this proves the value of protecting such secondary forests, as well as pristine forests.
Many of the world s forests are valuable sources of food or income for indigenous people.
A survey of 12 one-hectare plots across a rainfall gradient that runs through evergreen and deciduous forests in the Indian state of Karnataka found a high density of trees producing'non-timber
forest products''such as medicine and food. Results from the survey published earlier this year1 show that about one-third of such forests are vulnerable to climate change.
This has serious implications for the local economy, because most of the region's 1. 2 million inhabitants rely on the forests for their income,
says forestry expert N h. Ravindranath, who led the project with Earthwatch and is based at the Centre for Sustainable Technologies, part of the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore.
Bebber adds that data from the project"have been crucial in framing the Indian government's response to climate change.
Bebber who joined Earthwatch to head the climate project, is a once-sceptical convert to the idea of citizen scientists.
"The large amounts of data being collected by the programme's citizen-science efforts will provide a significant benefit to further the scientific understanding of current and future potential impacts of climate change on global forests.
Forest suspense Final voting on a law that would relax forest protection rules in the Brazilian Amazon was delayed last week until March 2012,
Scientists fear that the altered'forest code'would weaken rules on tree-clearing that have reduced deforestation in the Amazon.
in forests in Papua new guinea. A large number of diminutive frogs live in the region, which Kraus says may be a biological oddity.
Forest threat Brazil's Senate has approved a new'forest code, 'which scientists fear will weaken strict rules on tree-clearing that have reduced deforestation in the Amazon.
All landowners there have had to maintain forest on 80%of their land, but the new bill creates exemptions for small landowners
to wipe out forests and woodlands, says Daniel Nepstad, an ecologist who works with the Amazon Environmental Research Institute in Brasilia.
President Dilma Rouseff has pledged to veto the legislation. See go. nature. com/rutitm for more.
India s environment and forests minister, Jayanthi Natarajan, gave an impassioned speech invoking the original 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change,
Brazilian bill weakens Amazon protectionwerner Rudhart/dpa/Corbisbrazil's propsed new forest code would weaken rules on deforestation.
 The country s law governing forestry dates back to 1965 and made more stringent in the 1990s,  with dramatic results.
calls the updated forest code"undoubtedly the most restrictive and rigorous land-ownership legislation in the world.
an ecologist who works with the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM) in Brasilia, says that the new forestry measure could"unleash a wave of impunity to wipe out forests and woodlands.
of which roughly 3 million square kilometres is intact forests, according to  Luiz Antonio Martinelli, an ecologist at the University of S £o Paulo in Piracicaba who has analysed the legislation for senators.
But at the same time we re sending the wrong message by changing the forest code in a way that will increase deforestation again
Public health, business, agriculture and forestry, urban infrastructure and natural ecosystems are identified all as priority areas for early action.
wood burnt in rudimentary stoves fills houses with sooty smoke. Methane leaks from gas pipelines in Russia and rice paddies in China, eventually breaking down in sunlight and contributing to the production of smog and ozone.
and provide alternatives to wood, dung and charcoal for cooking and heating in poor countries.
Puravida Fotograf  a/Demotix/Corbischilean reserve scorched by wildfires Forest fires in Chile have ravaged almost 15,000 hectares of native forest and steppe in the Torres del Paine National park in Patagonia burning more than 8
which in turn displaces virgin forest. The application of such factors would sound a death knell for the European biodiesel industry.
Ash-covered forest is'Permian Pompeii'An ancient swampy forest full of long-extinct plant species has been brought to life through analyses of well-preserved fossils entombed in a layer of volcanic ash.
the eruption that smothered the tropical forest in what is now northern China created a time capsule that reveals an almost unprecedented level of detail about the region s flora,
Palaeoecologists can usually only infer the richness of an ancient forest ecosystem by piecing together fossils of plant fragments of varying ages.
and ecology of the forest, says Hermann Pfefferkorn, a palaeoecologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
Pfefferkorn and his colleagues have unearthed one such time capsule from 298-million-year-old rocks in northern China a'forest Pompeii'where the weight of falling ash ripped leaves from twigs,
the peat forest contained trees that looked like feather dusters, with trunks twice the height of telephone poles;
When the forest was sat alive, it on the northwestern edge of a large tropical island off the eastern shore of the supercontinent Pangaea,
and the forests ended up farther from the coasts, says Ralph Taggart, a palaeoecologist at Michigan State university in East Lansing.
this peat forest was frozen already in time as forests elsewhere evolved
Seven days: 10 16 february 2012events Putin's subglacial sample Russia's Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute in St petersburg confirmed on 8 february that scientists have managed to drill 3,
Many researchers are sceptical that humans wielding crude implements could have destroyed such large areas of forest."
But"Bantu famers have played probably a part in forest loss, he says,"accelerating local forest degradation.
Bayon says that the latest work does not necessarily contradict existing theories, but rather illustrates how the combination of culture
and modern markets for food and other forest products, he says
A whiff of interstellar clouda NASA spacecraft has detected directly atoms from outside the boundary of the Solar system
Biofuels are made from crops that are planted often on former forest or marsh land, and carbon-offset projects can result in the eviction of inhabitants of wooded areas that are bought up in exchange for carbon credits.
Green Resources, a forestry company based in Oslo, has bought up hundreds of thousands of hectares of forests in Mozambique,
threatening the food security and livelihoods of local populations by denying them access to their traditional lands and food sources4.
by contrast, 35%of forests in Asia and 28%in South america are subject to some kind of community tenure3."
to reduce carbon emissions, leave tropical forests standing. But a widely heralded approach in which rich nations would pay poorer ones to keep their forests intact has proved trickier to deploy than many had hoped.
Now a consortium of scientists, environmentalists and industries is expanding the focus from preserving forests to tackling the main driver of deforestation:
agriculture. The United nations forestry initiative known as REDD, for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation was seen originally as a way of changing frontier economics by attaching a monetary value to standing forests,
which take up carbon dioxide and stabilize the climate. Carbon payments would make it easier for landowners to earn a living without clearing more land.
and work at the forest frontier. Where money has changed hands, it has happened mostly among governments, says Daniel Nepstad,
soya and palm oil could have the greatest impact on carbon (see'Food versus forests').'With more than US$4 million in seed money from Norway, the consortium plans to announce an initial round of projects in the run-up to the UN Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de janeiro (Rio+20) in Brazil in June.
says Scott Poynton, executive director of the Forest Trust, a nonprofit organization in Crassier, Switzerland, which has been working with Swiss food company Nestlã and the world's second-largest palm-oil producer, Golden Agri-Resources in Indonesia,
Brazil, Indonesia, Nigeria, Peru and Mexico has launched its own initiative, the Governors'Climate and Forests Task force.
and reduce the incentives for clearing forests doesn't begin to flow soon, farmers in the developing world will give up on the process,
The saola (Pseudoryx nghetinhensis) was described first from skulls found in a Vietnamese forest reserve1, but the elusive antelope has rarely been seen alive.
W. Kolvoort/naturepl. combloodsuckers feast on the forest s rare delicacies.""It is a very easy way to get a snapshot of
Leeches are impossible to avoid in tropical forests, and they can be collected by the dozen by simply peeling them off intrepid researchers clothes.
but it s a very promising method for finding it and pretty much any other mammal in the forest
algal blooms and damage to important wetlands, eucalyptus forests and wildlife. To address these problems,
Despite this, some forest communities in the drier woodland parts of the floodplain would probably remain vulnerable,
Indonesian deforestation ban makes slow progressgary Braasch/Corbisindonesia's moratorium on clearing forests is not enough for the country to meet its climate change goals.
But as increasingly accurate forest maps and data on clearance permits become available, it is growing clear that the moratorium is having little effect on deforestation rates
a climate-change scientist at the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), based in Bogor, Indonesia.
An analysis from CIFOR, published last October, found that 42.5 million hectares of forest covered by the moratorium are protected already under Indonesian law, with only 22.5 million hectares receiving extra protection.
An updated version of Indonesia s forest map, published last week, shows that the government has included a further 862,
000 hectares of forest under the ban, but it has excluded also another 482,000 hectares, so the net additional protected forest is 380,000 hectares.
It is not yet clear what kinds of forest are covered by the changes. That could be the key to making the moratorium successful,
because some types of forest have greater conservation value and carbon-storage potential than others, says William Laurance, a forest-conservation scientist at James Cook University in Cairns, Australia.
Laurance and his colleagues studied the Indonesian forest maps and found that the moratorium excludes roughly 46 million hectares of vulnerable rainforest known as mixed-dipterocarp forest.
The findings were published online in Conservation Letters1 in April.""The mixed-dipterocarp forests of Indonesia are among the most biologically important
and imperilled real estate on earth, Laurance told Nature. These forests were left out of the moratorium
because they had previously been logged and so were thought to lack conservation value, says Laurance. But what remains is being cleared rapidly for palm-oil
or wood-pulp plantations or is being logged re, and so is in imminent danger, he adds. Laurance does commend the Indonesian government for protecting 11.5 million hectares of forests growing on carbon-rich peatland.
If deforested, these areas could release up to eight times more carbon into the atmosphere than would dryland forests growing on mineral soil.
The Indonesian government s priority for the second and final year of the ban must be to continue to improve forest monitoring
and governance of forest-clearance permits, says Nigel Sizer, director of the Global Forest Initiative at the World Resources Institute,
an environmental think tank based in WASHINGTON DC.""This will determine if Indonesia can stop deforestation, he says.
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