Unfortunately for children who play youth baseball eating unhealthy food during practices and games may be contributing to weight problems according to researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical center.
and lower nutrient densityâ#said Joseph Skelton M d. associate professor of pediatrics at Wake Forest Baptist and senior author of the study.
and research program manager of Brenner FIT a multidisciplinary pediatric obesity program at Wake Forest Baptist. â#oebut as seen in this study games
The above story is provided based on materials by Wake Forest Baptist Medical center. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
#Amazon rainforest survey could improve carbon offset schemescarbon offsetting initiatives could be improved with new insights into the make-up of tropical forests a study suggests.
Researchers from the Universities of Edinburgh and Leeds who led the research say their findings could help quantify the amount of carbon available to trade in areas of forest.
and improve understanding of how much carbon is stored in the world's forests which informs climate change forecasts.
Their research found that forests in the basin's northeast on average stored twice as much carbon as those in the southwest as a result of soil climate and species variation.
Scientists say this highlights the need to recognise that carbon is distributed not uniformly in the forest.
Satellite maps of the world's forests don't contain enough information about their carbon content.
Developing our understanding of this aspect of forests in the Amazon and elsewhere could be hugely important for our climate.
The study led by Liming Zhou of University at Albany State university of New york shows between 2000 and 2012 the decline affected an increasing amount of forest area and intensified.
because most climate models predict tropical forests may be under stress due to increasing severe water shortages in a warmer and drier 21st century climate Zhou said.
Scientists use the satellite-derived greenness of forest regions as one indicator of a forest's health.
The browning of the forest canopy is observed consistent with decreases in the amount of water available to plants
Forests of the Congo basin are known to be resilient to moderate climate change because they have been exposed to dry conditions in the past few hundred years Saatchi said.
and warming of the Atlantic ocean have created severe droughts in the tropics causing major impacts on forests.
We need to consider the complex range of processes affecting different tropical rainforest species before we can fully assess the future resilience of tropical forests.
As a result of the high frequency of human-caused fires mixed forests are turning into scrub and sparse oak woods
The area of forest degradation is increasing posing serious threats to certain species which may not be able to recover and
Statistics on forest fire causes show that human activities are responsible for 94 percent of fires in this forest zone of the Russian Far east.
Millions of acres of forest have been lost with severe economic and ecological impacts from a beetle outbreak ten times larger than previous outbreaks.
Because of its importance and impact on forestry the mountain pine beetle's genome has been sequenced recently. Using this new resource authors Janes et al. examined how the pine beetle could undergo such rapid habitat range expansion
Such information could give important new clues for the forestry industry to help curb the current devastation of North american forests from this pest.
Eike Luedeling of the World Agroforestry Centre in Nairobi Kenya; Josã de Jesã s Luna Ruiz of the Universidad Autã noma de Aguascalientes in Aguascalientes Mex.;
what had been thought to be untouched forest. By mapping distributions of enriched soils scientists hope to better understand how ancient people altered landscapes
and senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environmentbut that grim future isn't a foregone conclusion.
A scholarly theory was developed to estimate the number of species in such fractured landscapes where patches of forest surrounded by farms resemble islands of natural habitat.
and forest remnants can be more valuable for biodiversity than previously assumed said Daniel Karp who earned his Phd in biology at Stanford in 2013
The study focused on bat populations within a mosaic of forest fragments and farmland in Costa rica and on islands in a large lake in Panama.
In reality plantations in the countryside typically supported 18 bat species compared to the 23 to 28 supported by tropical forest fragments and nature reserves.
Overall as forest cover disappeared the rate of species loss was substantially and significantly higher in the island ecosystem and species abundances were compared increasingly uneven to the countryside ecosystem the study found.
fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. This indicates that human-altered landscapes can foster more biological diversity than we anticipated.
People are losing many of nature's benefits such as water purification provided by forests and wetlands and pest control provided by birds and bats.
and food production to make agricultural lands more hospitable to wildlife by reducing chemical inputs preserving fragments of forest and other natural habitats and rewarding farmers and ranchers for the benefits that result.
The land unit could be a plot plot area parcel tract field farm landscape position landscape wetland forest
#Five anthropogenic factors that will radically alter northern forests in 50 yearsin the most densely forested
and most densely populated quadrant of the United states forests reflect two centuries of human needs values and practices.
and development have set the stage for management issues of considerable concern today a U s. Forest Service study reports.
The report--Five anthropogenic factors that will radically alter forest conditions and management needs in the Northern United states--was published recently by the journal Forest Science
and is part of the Northern Forest Futures Project an effort led by the Forest Service's Northern Research Station to forecast forest conditions over the next 50 years in the 20-state region
extending from Maine to Minnesota and from Missouri to Maryland. The study is available at:
and magnitude of the effects of climate change said lead author Stephen Shifley a research forester with the Northern Research Station.
Addressing these issues today will make northern forests more resilient to the effects of climate change and to any other natural or anthropogenic disturbances in the long term.
Northern forests lack age-class diversity and will uniformly grow old without management interventions or natural disturbances.
Nearly 60 percent of northern forest land is clustered in age classes spanning 40 to 80 years;
young forests (age 20 years or less) are only 8 percent of all forests in the region;
and forests older than 100 years are 5 percent of forests. The area of forest land in the North will decrease as a consequence of expanding urban areas.
Cities in the 20-state region are expected to gain another 27 million people in the next 50 years
Invasive species will alter forest density diversity and function. The U s. North has the dubious distinction of having the greatest number of invasive insects
Management intensity for timber is low in Northern forests and likely to remain so. A low propensity or low capacity for forest management reduces options for addressing perceived problems such as low forest diversity invasive species and other insects or disease problems.
Management for non-timber objectives will gain relevance but will be challenging to implement. An unintended consequence of reduced timber harvesting may be reduced capacity to subsidize other restoration activities--either through revenue from timber sales or through manipulation of vegetation and woody fuels during logging.
Actions that researchers and land managers can take to address these issues include: The northern quadrant of the United states includes 172 million acres of forest land
and 124 million people said Michael T. Rains Director of the Northern Research Station and the Forest Products Laboratory.
In the next 50 years the link between forests and economic and human health will grow.
The Northern Forest Futures Project is helping identify the individual and collective steps needed to ensure healthy and resilient futures for trees and people alike.
Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by USDA Forest Service-Northern Research Station.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. Journal Reference e
#Saving the lesser prairie chicken: What landowners should knowcumulative habitat loss encroachment by invasive woody plants wind energy development petroleum production
and the ongoing drought are just a handful of reasons why there are fewer lesser prairie chickens in the wild today according to the U s. Fish and Wildlife Service
and scientists from around the world have recommended changes including some in agriculture forestry and other land use designed to mitigate their effects on climate change.
Rice was part of a group of 18 authors from around the world who wrote the chapter pertaining to agriculture forestry and other land use.
If you add in forestry it moves it up to around 25 percent. Agriculture is significant but not the major contributor and has declined slightly percentage-wise
About 240 scientists including specialists in forestry land use social science economics and others contributed to the third group report's 16 chapters.
but rather assessing the current state of the science on how agriculture forestry and land use contribute to
which impacted the U s. Key Recommendations for Agriculture Forestry and Other Land Usesoil carbon sequestration--One of the recommendations coming out of this
Promoting product use with low emissions--This recommendation pertains mostly to the forestry sector Rice said.
That's one of the unusual aspects for our sector is that land is used for multiple things--agriculture forestry
and 400 years of history in the eastern U s.--led by scientists at Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory the Harvard Forest and elsewhere--point to ways in
which seemingly stable forests could abruptly change over the next century. Trees are great recorders of information says Dave Orwig an ecologist at the Harvard Forest
and co-author of the new study. They can give us a glimpse back in time. The tree records in this study show that just before the American revolution across the broadleaf forests of Kentucky Tennessee North carolina
and Arkansas the simultaneous death of many trees opened huge gaps in the forest--prompting a new generation of saplings to surge skyward.
There's no historical evidence that the dead trees succumbed to logging ice storms or hurricanes. Instead they were weakened likely by repeated drought leading up to the 1770s followed by an intense drought from 1772 to 1775.
The oversized generation of new trees that followed-something like a baby boom--shaped the old-growth forests that still stand in the Southeast today.
Many of us think these grand old trees in our old-growth forests have always been stood there
What we now see is that big events including climatic extremes created large portions of these forests in short order through the weakening and killing of existing trees.
Pederson who will become a senior ecologist at the Harvard Forest in fall 2014 notes that as climate warms increasing drought conditions
and earlier springs like that of 1774 could easily expose eastern forests to the kinds of conditions that changed them so abruptly in the 17th and 18th centuries.
whereas in Europe even in medieval times people took their pigs to forage in the forests where they might encounter wild boars.
To determine whether the physical properties of trees influenced nesting site selection scientists measured the physical characteristics of wood from common tree species at the Toro-Semliki Wildlife Reserve Uganda.
what kind of wood you use to make it. Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by PLOS.
Traditional shade grown coffee is cultivated under a diverse canopy of native forest trees in dense to moderate shade.
Though some of the forest understory is cleared for farming a rich web of plant and animal life remains.
As a result shade grown coffee plantations provide corridors for migrating birds to move between forest fragments attract
because the forest replenishes the soil for them. Farmers doing intensive coffee farming also earn lower prices for their product.
A study carried out by the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) in Kenya shows that trade in herbal medicinal products is rising in the urban areas
The study published in the scientific journal Forests Trees and Livelihoods says that In Kenya the majority of traditional medicines are sold as wild plant parts
The study reveals that most farmers sell timber and fruits from their trees but are not selling medicinal tree products
The above story is provided based on materials by World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
-which has replaced largely felled forest in much of the region-for the first time. The deforestation-induced warming forecasted by the model can be attributed in large part to reduced evaporation say the researchers.
#Dead wood alive with management information in old-growth Iranian forestdead wood such as old stumps and logs is overlooked often
when examining a forest's vitality; however new research from old-growth forests in Iran point out the importance of this often-overlooked feature.
Dead wood is great habitat for wildlife provides a sheltered environment for young seedlings holds soil
and moisture on the site and stores carbon said Carolyn Copenheaver an associate professor of forest ecology In virginia Tech's College of Natural resources and Environment.
So woody debris management is important for conservation but it requires baseline measurements of relatively undisturbed mature forests
which haven't yet been done in some parts of the world including Iran. According to a study in the July 2013 issue of Natural Areas Journal researchers sought to characterize the volume of coarse and fine woody debris present in old-growth beech forests in the Caspian Hyrcanian mixed
forest of northern Iran; compare the number and volume of different forms of coarse woody debris such as logs snags
or stumps and correlate the understory coarse woody debris volume to the overstory forest structure.
These research objectives are given very timely the documented loss and degradation of Iranian Hyrcanian forests due to illegal logging fuel wood cutting expansion of agricultural fields
and expanding construction to support nature-based tourism said the researchers including Copenheaver with Kiomars Sefidi formerly a doctoral student in natural resources at the University of Tehran who studied the subject at the university's Kheyrud Experimental Forest.
Sefidi's committee chair was Mohammad R. Marvie Mohadjer a professor in silviculture and forest ecology at the University of Tehran and his graduate committee members were Reinhard Mosandl chair of silviculture at the Technical University of Munich.
Working in 15 plots of 2. 5-acres the researchers recorded diameter height and species of living trees;
Oriental beech was the dominant species in the layer of foliage in the forest canopy known as the overstory
But in terms of volume the course woody debris in the section of the Kheyrud Experimental Forest is significantly less than in the Kheiroud Forest also in northern Iran
which Sefidi and Marvie Mohadjer had studied also and about half of the volume in old-growth beech forests in Turkey and Albania
Most of the coarse wood debris in the forest was advanced in an state of decay meaning the trees mostly now in the form of rotting logs had been dead 12 to 59 years
Almost 40 percent of the total volume of dead wood was fine woody debris--a size class that has received little attention.
Some old-growth characteristics may be desirable for managers to incorporate into managed stands such as increasing coarse woody debris to levels consistent with natural stands in order to increase habitat potential and biodiversity.
However as with the findings of lower than natural volume of course woody material at the Kheyrud Experimental Forest site it is important to understand all of the influences on a stand's condition before using it as a reference for restoration
#Fire and drought may push Amazonian forests beyond tipping pointfuture simulations of climate in the Amazon suggest a longer dry season leading to more drought and fires.
which consumed more forests in Amazonia than previously understood. Over an eight-year period the team repeatedly burned 50-hectare forest plots in southeast Amazonia to learn how fire frequency and weather conditions affected tree deaths.
The forest didn't burn much in average years but burned extensively in drought years.
In 2007 fires in southeast Amazonia burned 10 times more forest than in an average climate year an area equivalent to a million soccer fields according to co-author Douglas Morton of NASA.
Large portions of Amazonian forests are already experiencing droughts and are increasingly susceptible to fire.
Agricultural development has created smaller forest fragments which exposes forest edges to the hotter dryer conditions in the surrounding landscape
These fragmented forests are more likely to be invaded by flammable grasses which further increase the likelihood and intensity of future fires.
According to lead-author Dr. Paulo Brando This study shows that fires are already degrading large areas of forests in Southern Amazonia
and fire when attempting to predict the future of Amazonian forests under a changing climate.
None of the models used to evaluate future Amazon forest health include fire so most predictions grossly underestimate the amount of tree death
and overestimate overall forest health said Dr. Coe. The results of this project show that extreme droughts may interact with fires to push Amazonian forests beyond a tipping point that may abruptly increase tree mortality and change vegetation over large areas.
#Nutrient-rich forests absorb more carbonthe ability of forests to sequester carbon from the atmosphere depends on nutrients available in the forest soils shows new research from an international team of researchers including IIASA.
The study published in the journal Nature Climate Change showed that forests growing in fertile soils with ample nutrients are able to sequester about 30%of the carbon that they take up during photosynthesis. In contrast forests growing in nutrient-poor
Marcos Fernandez-Martinez first author of the paper and researcher at the Center for Ecological Research and Forestry Applications (CREAF) and the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) says In general nutrient
-poor forests spend a lot of energy--carbon--through mechanisms to acquire nutrients from the soil whereas nutrient-rich forests can use that carbon to enhance biomass production.
Until now scientific models to predict forest carbon sequestration on a global scale had considered only the amount of nitrogen in the soil
and did not take into account other constraints such as phosphorus or the ph of the soil which is related to the availability of nutrients.
The new study includes both those factors as well as nitrogen availability in an analysis synthesizing data from 92 forests in different climate zones on the planet.
which will have consequences for the state's forests. A new U s. Forest Service report describes the potential risks and opportunities of climate change for forests in the eastern Upper Peninsula and northern Lower Peninsula.
More than 30 scientists and forest managers contributed to Michigan Forest Ecosystem Vulnerability Assessment and Synthesis. The study is part of the Northwoods Climate Change Response Framework a collaboration of federal state academic and private partners led by the Forest Service's Northern Institute of Applied Climate
Science (NIACS). ) Climate change information is presented often at scales that are hard to digest said Stephen Handler the lead author for the vulnerability assessment.
This report is designed to give forest managers in Michigan the best possible science on effects of climate change for our particular forest ecosystems
so they can make climate-informed decisions about management today. The assessment evaluates the vulnerability of forest ecosystems within a 16.6-million-acre area in Michigan's eastern Upper Peninsula and northern Lower Peninsula about 70 percent of the state's forested land cover.
Topics covered include information on the contemporary landscape past climate trends and a range of projected future climates.
Climate change is expected also to intensify several stresses that forests already face such as damaging insect pests and diseases drought and wildfire.
In addition to conditions becoming less favorable for northern forest species and conditions improving for southern species the vulnerability assessment finds:
Confronting the challenge of climate change presents opportunities for foresters and other decision-makers to plan ahead manage for resilient landscapes
and ensure that the benefits that forests provide are sustained into the future said Michael T. Rains Director of the Northern Research Station and the Forest Products Laboratory.
Forest Service science is delivering tools and data that will help managers in Michigan and throughout the nation meet this challenge.
The report was published by the U s. Forest Service's Northern Research Station and is available online at:
The above story is provided based on materials by USDA Forest Service-Northern Research Station. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length h
Across neighborhoods of Wisconsin from the North Woods to the cities the results are striking says Dr. Kristen Malecki assistant professor of population health sciences at the UW School of medicine and Public health.
So for example a poor person living on a logging road in the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest was more likely to be happy than a wealthier person living on a treeless block in Milwaukee.
This idea is also the theme of the book Last Child in the Woods which suggested that indoor lifestyle and more screen time hurt children's attention spans.
In agriculture and forestry for example it could be used to keep animals from gnawing on trees.
The Adirondack Park represents the southern range extent for several species of boreal forest birds in eastern North america.
The habitats of these boreal specialists--cool wet sphagnum-draped bogs and swampy woods--are thought to be vulnerable to climate change particularly in the Adirondacks where they are fragmented more than in forest to the north.
and WCS Adirondack Program Science Director Michale Glennon explores occupancy patterns over time for eight bird species in lowland boreal forest wetlands in the Adirondacks.
on faculty in environmental Earth system science and senior fellows at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.
Following the complete wartime collapse of the country's economy Liberia's government has been trying to fuel economic growth by selling large amounts of its rich natural resources including rubber timber and minerals.
and The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds in Bedfordshire UK via the Across the River Project together with experienced rangers from the Forestry Development Authority in Liberia local research assistants from Liberia and Sierra leone
which currently include only 3. 8 percent of the country's forests. In 2003 the Liberian government agreed to increase the extent of the protected area network to conserve at least 30 percent of the country's forests.
The results of our study provide crucial information for site prioritization and selection in this ongoing process says lead author Clement Tweh of the Wild Chimpanzee Foundation in Liberia.
and forestry projects are encroaching fast. Since the ban on timber exports was repealed in 2006 more than 20000 square kilometres of forest have already been assigned as forestry concessions
and awarded to international and local investors. Additionally since 2010 logging companies were issued so-called Private Use Permits
and accounted for almost half of Liberia's remaining primary forest. Fortunately President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf recently withdrew almost half of these allocations thus saving tens of thousands of square kilometres of primary tropical rainforest.
This survey showed that in areas where primary rainforest was still abundant hunting was the anthropogenic threat most frequently encountered followed by logging mining and non-timber forest product extraction.
for the Protection of Birds in the Gola Forests Sierra leone and Liberia. With this study we provide an accurate and comprehensive data-based platform for local wildlife protection authorities policy-makers
Forests provide essential ecosystem services for people including timber food and water. For those struggling with the after-effects of deforestation the main hope lies in rebuilding forest resources through ecological restoration.
Researchers at BU have shown that placing a monetary value on ecosystem services provides a mechanism for evaluating the costs and benefits of reforestation activity.
Ecological restoration initiatives are being undertaken around the world attracting investment of $us billions annually explained Professor Adrian Newton.
Professor Newton developed this method as part of the Reforlan research project in the dryland forests of Latin america.
The UN say these targets can be achieved through Forest Landscape Restoration which is developed an approach tested
We examined how Forest Landscape Restoration may be implemented in practice and evaluated the cost effectiveness of this approach
Professor Newton has demonstrated that at the heart of successful forest landscape restoration is a flexible and adaptive approach.
The Forest Landscape Restoration method has been heralded as the solution to restoring 150 million acres of degraded
Individual countries have committed so far to restoring 50 million hectares of forest which is a significant step towards achieving the policy goals.
This initiative directly employs the Forest Landscape Restoration approach that we researched developed tested and refined explains Professor Newton.
and the full title of the project is'Restoration of Forest Landscapes for Biodiversity Conservation and Rural development'.
#A balanced carbon footprint for the Amazon Riverconsidered until now a source of greenhouse gas emissions capturing the CO2 fixed by the tropical forest through the soils of the watershed to release it into the atmosphere the Amazon river actually has balanced a carbon footprint.
and not that fixed by the tropical forest releasing as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as it absorbs.
and in space as the proportion of vegetation diminishes from upstream of the study area where flooded forests dominate to downstream where the majority of the lakes are found.
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