with their forest-dwelling cousins. The reason, researchers report today, is that urban noise and light have altered the city birds biological clocks1.
as well as to those living in a nearby forest. The transmitters monitored the birds activity for three weeks.
whereas forest birds started their activity at dawn, city birds began 29 minutes earlier, on average,
The researchers found that the city birds in the enclosures had faster biological clocks than forest birds.
with their periods of activity and rest becoming more irregular than those of the forest birds.
Plastic wood is no green guaranteeishmael Tirado watches as his fellow construction workers rebuild the Steeplechase Pier, a central feature of New york s iconic Coney island boardwalk.
Planks of tropical ip wood that were torn asunder by last year s Hurricane Sandy lie in grey stacks behind him,
But some researchers fear that a knee-jerk shift away from tropical timber could backfire on the environment."
"If it s sustainable, the timber trade is generally a good thing, says Duncan Brack,
The scant data available suggest that plastic wood typically a composite of waste wood and plastic exacts a higher climate-change cost than natural wood,
One 2011 study, funded by the timber industry but independently peer-reviewed, found that the greenhouse-gas emissions from the manufacture of plastic wood are nearly three times higher than those from the production of chemically treated cedar1.
Data from the Consortium for Research on Renewable Industrial Materials a public-private partnership based at the University of Washington in Seattle,
suggest that emissions from plastic-wood manufacture are 45-330%higher than those of redwood production,
Yet plastic wood which is marketed often as eco-friendly and low-maintenance is growing in popularity.
Ohio (see Timber trade). The shift has also been driven by supply. In New york, the decision to use more concrete and plastic came after officials concluded that there was no natural timber comparable to ip
which is prized for its strength and durability available in sufficient quantity to meet the city s needs.
the Freedonia Groupbut the evidence for plastic timber s durability is thin, in part because the industry arose only about two decades ago,
The first generation of plastic timber had problems with sagging and rot; newer products are better,
And without solid data on the lifetimes of different types of plastic timber, it is difficult to assess their environmental impacts,
Information about tropical-timber production is incomplete but suggests that the industry has an outsize environmental impact.
According to the International Tropical Timber Organization, tropical countries supply about 10%of the world s industrial wood, much of it from plantations.
But of the 400 million hectares (more than half of the world s total) of tropical forest used for timber production today
The simple solution is to avoid tropical wood, but that undercuts the market for timber that is sustainably produced, says Doug Boucher, head of the tropical-forestry programme for the Union of Concerned Scientists in Cambridge, Massachusetts."
"This kind of quick and relatively unsophisticated response basically hurts tropical countries, at the expense of the developed world,
Industry and governments have taken steps to improve the market for sustainable tropical wood. The Forest Stewardship Council was launched in 1993 to create an independent certification for sustainably produced timber.
More recently, many countries have banned the importation of illegally produced timber. The United states instituted such a ban in 2008.
Europe this year went a step further by implementing regulations requiring companies that import wood to establish plans to ensure that the imports are legal.
The United kingdom requires all government-procured wood to be certified as sustainable. The impact of these initiatives is not yet clear
but there are signs of progress. A 2010 study by Chatham House found that illegal logging had dropped by nearly 25%over the preceding decade,
Many illegal timber exports are going to China, where they are blended into the larger industrial supply chain.
paper and timber for construction that it has quite a large knock-on effect on the rest of the market,
Some ip is certified by organizations such as the Forest Stewardship Council, but the overall production data are uncertain."
and the city has acknowledged the historical significance of natural wood in some locations. On a recent weekend, construction crews were busy replacing small sections of boardwalk near the Steeplechase Pier with fresh ip
Conservation experts say that the cordgrass-eradication scheme given US$163 Â million by the Shanghai Forestry Bureau
Ultimately, that may drive clearing of forests, peatlands and wetlands rich in sequestered carbon causing large emissions of carbon dioxide."
Northern forests rev up carbon cyclenorthern forests are not just surviving but thriving, despite concerns about droughts, wildfires and bark beetles surging as the world warms.
Boreal forests in particular have shown marked increases in carbon uptake during summer.""Something quite massive is taking place on large parts of the landscape that are impacted not directly by humans,
despite growing concerns about the vulnerability of northern forests to pests and fires.""Everybody hears about negative feedbacks on the carbon cycle,
Instead, it seems to be driven primarily by a significant increase in carbon uptake by boreal forests to the south during the prime growing months of June and July.
The exact mechanisms for the forests increased appetite for CO2 remain unclear. Earlier studies seemed to suggest that CO2 fertilization could not explain it
including the expansion of forests in a warmer climate and a shift towards younger, faster-growing trees in areas where old-growth forests have died off."
"Our models all seem to fail to capture this effect, sometimes woefully, Keeling says. This raises questions about the answers those models are delivering about the future,
the more forest grew on and near a coffee farm, the more birds the farm had,
They found that beetle-eating birds were most common at sites with lots of stretches of forest nearby,
and that beetle infestations were slightly more severe at sites that were surrounded not by abundant forest.
many of the avian exterminators were living in small scraps of unprotected woodland, rather than in big nature reserves.
But Johnson is sceptical about the impact of forest cover. The link between infestation and forest coverage"is obviously not rock-solid
he says. Karp and colleagues'results show only a very modest drop in borers as forest coverage grows,
he points out, and Johnson would like to see stronger evidence that the effect is real.
Karp responds that the relationship between forest coverage and beetle infestation is statistically significant and that another team working in Costa rica reported a similar effect last year3.
Forest management plans in a tanglein the middle of metropolitan San francisco stands an army and many Bay Area residents want it to stay garrisoned there.
It is a forest of nonnative, invasive blue gum eucalyptus, along with Monterey cypress and pine, that has covered the city s Mount Sutro since the late nineteenth century.
has sought to manage the forest. Its aim is to reduce fire hazards and to encourage native grasses,
wild forest right in the middle of our city and the university wants to destroy it, says Paul Rotter,
Selective tree-clearing on Mount Sutro would help the larger remaining trees to fight the beetle and fungal pests currently afflicting the forest,
She found that the raptors do need not strictly old-growth forests; land used for timber harvesting can work, too.
She says that, at the time, accepting the idea felt like a move to the"dark side."
and today the forest feels like a primeval jungle a tangle of almost exclusively introduced species. Joe Mascaro,
Congo carbon plan kicks offthe data will also enhance scientists understanding of tropical forests role in global climate regulation."
"If these countries know how to monitor their forests quantitatively, it will help us solve the problem.
For years, govern  ments have debated a treaty that would allow developed countries to offset their own greenhouse-gas emissions by helping tropical countries to conserve their forests.
it must map biomass across a staggering 155 Â million hectares the largest tropical forest in a single country outside Brazil
it has so much forest, and it s so poor, says Aurã lie Shapiro, the project s technical lead with WWF Germany,
His calculations suggest that the DRC s forests contain 22 billion to 24 Â billion tonnes of carbon,
because biomass can vary by up to 50%between patches of forest. With a map at 100-metre resolution
the DRC will be better able to calculate the emissions that would result from clearing a block of forest.
The team will then begin operating out of more remote airports, many little more than dirt runways in the jungle.
selected to capture different types of forest and to avoid conflict zones in the war-torn country.
but can be extrapolated to the entire forest through calibration with ground data and satellite imagery.
and height at several hundred ground plots the classic way to calculate forest biomass. The biomass estimates are used then to calibrate imagery from NASA s Landsat spacecraft and radar data from Japan s Advanced Land Observing Satellite,
to produce a measure of carbon for all 155 million hectares of jungle.""We have limited only areas where it s safe to land.
The DRC is not the only country embarking on large-scale forest measurements. Gabon, in the western Congo Basin, is planning to map its forests using the same technique,
and in the past few years Peru has mapped the carbon in its part of the Amazon (see Nature 461,1048-1052;
) Brazil has made less-detailed assessments of forest carbon, but its system for monitoring deforestation is the world s most advanced.
Matthew Hansen, a remote-sensing scientist at the University of Maryland in College Park who works with forest mappers in Kinshasa, says that the DRC project faces hurdles.
Geologists take drill to Triassic parktourists flock to Petrified forest national park in Arizona to marvel at great glittering logs of petrified wood.
but the Petrified Forest area is pretty darn good when it comes to details. The Petrified Forest effort has been years in the making.
It is a follow-up to a project in which a Triassic core was drilled from New jersey s Newark sediment basin between 1990 and 1993 (ref. 1). That project aimed to tease out changes in the amount of sediment that was deposited as Earth went through cyclical shifts in the shape of its orbital path
and the Petrified Forest core would need to capture a sufficient record to settle the debate.
Geologists have explored the Petrified Forest area since the 1850s, most recently for its rich array of Triassic fossils.
says Bill  Parker, Petrified Forest s palaeontologist. The challenge is tying separate discoveries into a coherent, well-dated story.
Petrified Forest is unusual in calling itself a science park and in having Parker on staff as a full-time palaeontologist.
They are costing an estimated US$15 Â billion in losses each year, with damage to crops and forests a particular problem."
decade-long project funded by the Ministry of Science and Technology to study invasive species in agriculture and forestry.
Most of the forest pest species in North america originally came from China and some of its exports have wreaked havoc in Europe.
was captured by some of the special microphones set up by the project in the forests of Gabon and the Republic of congo.
The aim is to monitor the sounds that forest elephants use to communicate, which humans can sometimes feel
For example, other than counting dung piles along a transect to try to estimate population density, the only typical method of collecting data on forest elephants is by direct observation at clearings in the forest, measuring
Nations fight back on ivorymy impression is that the situation is very bad for forest elephants.
we think that forest elephants are taking the brunt of ivory poaching more and more. Rainforests are difficult places to patrol
I would say that all populations of forest elephants are in deep trouble, and the ones most at risk are those at the edges of their current range in Cameroon and the Central african republic.
where once more than 60%of all forest elephants lived. I believe there are some fronts where science can be a big help.
Fungus discovery offers pine-wilt hopethe pine-wood nematode is a major pest in the forests of China.
The pests seem to prefer certain pine forests over others, but the reason has not been clear."
pine forests are affected not equally, says Sun."A burning question is what makes an alien species invasive in some habitats but not the others.
and threatens forestry in other European countries2.""It s a big concern, Mota says.""Effective ways to stop its spread are needed badly.
and the sink could become even more substantial as forests form, the team reports. Abandoned land, says Schierhorn,
accounts for about one-third of the carbon sink provided by all forests in western Russia.
but they can benefit forests. A study in the humid rainforests of Belize shows that plant-killing fungi can help preserve diversity in such ecosystems.
provides experimental support for a leading ecological hypothesis on why any given plant species does not take over in species-rich forests.
The team marked field plots in the Chiquibul Forest Reserve in southwestern Belize, where the ground is laced with thick,
Lewis notes that the work could be important for understanding how forests might react to climate change
an ecologist at Washington University in St louis, Missouri, adds that the Belize study could inform forest-restoration efforts by highlighting the importance of fungi in the soil."
Chemical treatment could cut cost of biofuela mild chemical treatment that completely dissolves wood, dried grasses and other indigestible plant matter could greatly improve the efficiency of converting waste biomass to fuel.
and forestry lies unused in more-complex chains of sugars, for example lignin and cellulose. These tough, recalcitrant materials,
Tree growth never slowsmany foresters have assumed long that trees gradually lose their vigour as they mature,
The scientific literature is chock-full of studies that focus on forests'initial growth and their gradual move towards a plateau in the amount of carbon they store as they reach maturity2.
In their study, Stephenson and his colleagues analysed reams of data on 673,046 trees from 403 species in monitored forest plots, in both tropical and temperate areas around the world.
In one old-growth forest plot in the western United states for instance, trees larger than 100 centimetres in diameter comprised just 6%of trees,
And in older forests, fewer large trees dominate growth trends until they are brought eventually down by a combination of fungi, fires, wind and gravity;
the rate of carbon accumulation depends on how fast old forests turn over.""It s the geometric reality of tree growth:
which wood is deposited, Sillett says.""The idea that older forests are decadent it s really just a myth.
The findings help to resolve some of these contradictions, says Maurizio Mencuccini, a forest ecologist at the University of Edinburgh, UK.
The younger trees may grow faster on a relative scale, he says, meaning that they take less time to,
The study has broad implications for forest management, whether in maximizing the yield of timber harvests
or providing old-growth habitat and increasing carbon stocks. More broadly the research could help scientists to develop better models of how forests function
and their role in regulating the climate
Seven days: 10 16 january 2014industrial blast An explosion at a chemical plant in Japan on 9 Â January killed 5 and injured 12.
The blast at Mitsubishi Materials in Yokkaichi, about 300 Â kilometres west of Tokyo, occurred
Navigating backwards and forwards in time, one could track changes in everything from crops, forests and wildlife movement to urban sprawl and natural disasters, all with unrivalled temporal precision.
including researchers, in areas as diverse as farming, forest carbon management, regional and local planning,
He points to a study published in November that found that the use of moderate-resolution Landsat imagery greatly underestimated forest loss in the Democratic republic of the congo (A.  Tyukavina et  al.
says Mike Wulder, a researcher at the Canadian Forest Service in Victoria and a member of the Landsat science team.
He uses remote sensing to study forests and notes that good spectral and radiometric resolution (detection of small differences in wavelength and radiation,
since 2009 was announced on 18 Â February with the US$25-billion purchase of Forest Laboratories in New york. Forest is being acquired by Actavis,
Tracking forests A tool enabling the public to track deforestation around the globe was launched on 19 Â February by the World Resources Institute (WRI),
The Global Forest Watch monitoring system integrates several data sources including satellite imagery and publicly available statistics to track forest cover, loss and use.
and an estimated global illegal trade in wildlife products of US$20 billion a year a figure that does not include timber
and timber trafficking as a"serious crime, which carries a minimum prison sentence of four years. go. nature. com/htpd2l
which is a really basic component of a boreal forest ecosystem.""A genetic rescue could set a precedent for intervention in other parks.
which native cotton  woods and willows can germinate, says Patrick Shafroth, a plant ecologist with the US Geological Survey in Fort Collins, Colorado.
or sleep under the stars on the ground in the middle of a popular National Forest campground in a place known to be trafficked highly by humans as well as wildlife?
I didn't think anything of it everyone whose been out deep in the woods knows there's every type of animal all around you.
and killed by a pack of timber wolves. They were running at me and came within 15 feet of me before
and these species have grown never as major types of bamboo. 3. Pandas are black and white in a green forest. 4. Female Pandas ovulate once per year
or really even destroy the forest. It just needs to damage some of it for a short term
We need to work harder to find more fundamental reasons to save various forests and parks around the world.
The 2008 earthquake is a good example of this as it risked killing off multiple pandas by destroying bamboo forests denning sites killing the pandas directly etc.
Sunlight streaking through high windows washes over a forest of gleaming copper pot stills over ten feet high.
It's a widespread enormously successful and adaptive species living worldwide in all sorts of climates in forests on mountains in suburbs and sometimes even cities.
#Green Energy Scheme To Burn Beetle-Infested Trees For Electricityaldo Leopold described the burning of wood as re-releasing the sunshine the tree depended upon to grow.
however in part because in many regions of the world groups are trying to protect the trees and forests.
In a new program the U s. Forest Service is fueling a biomass power plant in Colorado with trees killed by a pest called the mountain pine beetle Greenwire reports.
Some environmental groups such as the council are worried also about the Forest Service encouraging logging for biomass plants.
Watching the video it reminded me of the old Test Driving video game on the PC a long time ago. lol---In space no one can hear a tree fall in the forest.
My concept car ecologically friendly and low CO2 footprint will be an external combustion CNG fueled car made almost exclusively of wood
http://syzygyastro. hubpages. com/hub/Geomagnetic-Reversal-and-its-Effectschop down more forests!..The coinciding periods of correlation between the Earthã¢Â#Â#s global temperature and the strength of the Earthã¢Â#Â#s global magnetic fieldit is obvious that the long term variation between the temperature
Instead Glenfiddich uses barrels that have contributed already much of the wood's flavoring compounds to American bourbon.
---In space no one can hear a tree fall in the forest t
#Follow A Queen bee On Her Maiden Mating Flightqueen honeybees mate just once in their lives within weeks of emerging as an adult from the little honeycomb cells in
It's about the size of a big housecat and lives in the dense foliage of trees from rainforests to hardwood forests to eucalyptus forests.
and has no beard. 4. Sustainable Dietscolobus monkeys are almost exclusively leaf-eaters filling an important niche in the tops of the African forest.
Most dense forests have lots of leaves and fruits that are poisonous or indigestible to most animals;
think of the eucalyptus of Australia or the bamboo forests of China. The colobus monkeys eat this abundant food
Much of the wood used to make the pulp that's turned into paper is actually byproducts of wood used to make other items--a cobbled-together mush of regular wood woodchips sawdust and other wood detritus.
and causes an increased demand for wood they have to be able to meet that supply
The architects used seven Series 1 3d printers to print out 585 plastic pieces then hauled them to the Redwood Forest
Spanning 10 x 10 x 8 feet Echoviren is a translucent white enclosure stark and artificial against the natural palette of reds and greens of the forest.
A graft within the space of the forest Echoviren is a space for contemplation of the landscape of the natural and our relationship with these constructs.
It focuses on the essence of the forest not as a natural system but as a palimpsest.
if I dump a large piece of plastic in woods and those who observe me do it would call it pollution via plastic c
For civet coffee a cute Southeast Asian forest creature called the Asian palm civet helps out with some of these steps.
Depletion of forests and associated erosion and environmental damage in developing countries is a concern.
and replant forests.)The good news is trees are a renewable resource and can be replanted.
We deforest for everything from toilet paper to wood for infrastructure and what the article hints to is that and
Combing the jungle and surrounding waters they located debris from more than five dozen aircraft. Last year local spear fishermen diving on Palau's western barrier reef stumbled across one of the most impressive finds:
It lives in the high forest of Ecuador and Colombia--delightfully called cloud forests--and rarely comes down from the trees adept as it is at leaping around the branches.
Researchers aren't sure whether the species is at critical risk; Helgen estimates that 42 percent of its possible home territory has been deforested so he says there is reason to be concerned.
Helgen thinks there may be up to four subspecies of olinguito roaming around the forest which is pretty much unheard-of for a mammal discovery at this time in history.
While we cannot predict what will happen in each individual cask we do know that approximately 70%of the flavor characteristics of Glenfiddich come from the wood and the time spent maturing in it.
In Scotland we predominately use two types of wood to mature whiskyã¢Â#Âmerican white oak (Quercus alba) and European oak (Quercus robur.
American wood is the most popular accounting for approximately 90%of casks used today but it is important to remember that each different wood gives its own unique characteristics to the whisky.
For example Q. alba produces vanilla flavors (fruity sweet) while Q. robur yields a rich tannic kick.
'The relationship between the liquid and the wood is one of the many intriguing aspects of whisky.
On the other hand European wood is toasted only lightly and therefore does not have pronounced the same subtractive qualities.
Oak wood contains hemicellulose lignin and tannins. These elements cultivate chemical reactions with the base spirit adding aromatic molecules to produce flavors such as coconut vanilla and fruit.
We find that Scotch whisky matured in European wood will have a darker more reddish hue to it than that
which has spent most of its life in American wood. INTERACTIVE: Wood is semi-porous meaning that the cask is always breathing
and interacting with its warehouse environment. Around 2%of the volume of each cask water and ethanol evaporates from the cask each year.
which grows the evergreen seedlings tree planters put in the ground for reforestation. Our growth medium is mostly peat moss with some ground and sterilized styrofoam (recycled from the old
It was like magic says James Yoo a researcher at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine who is developing a portable printer to graft skin directly onto burn victims.
Then led by Anthony Atala at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine researchers began to seed those cells onto artificial scaffolds.
At Wake Forest Yoo's and Atala's teams built custom bioprinters that are modified faster than inkjets
#U s. Forest Service Solves Mystery Of Exploding Baseball Batsmaple is the unofficial wood of baseball.
Thanks to good old Barry Bonds who used maple bats in his 2001 marathon home-run season players increasingly favor the lighter wood which according to one collector just has more pop than other bat
so they've teamed up with U s. Forest Service scientists to figure out how to make maple bats safer.
The scientists found that the more the cut of the wood strayed from the original grain the more likely the bat was to shatter The New york times reports.
The baseball league altered regulations to require that the grain in the bat not deviate from the original grain of the wood by more than 3 percent as well as adding minimum densities and weight-to-length ratios.
Black ink was added to the wood to make the grain easier to follow. It seems to be paying off.
the wood would still break -but the laminate should make it stay together. No splinters flying through the air.
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