One hectare of land in a tropical forest can hold 650 tree species more than in all of Canada and the continental US.
That is why the diversity in a tropical forest cannot be explained by the exploitation of niches alone.
and such) and biotic elements (in other words other species). Tropical forests have stable abiotic environments so Coley and Kursar concluded it must be the biotic interactions that explain the extraordinary diversity in these forests.
They argue in an article just published in Science that an arms race between plants and plant-eaters is what drives evolutionary changes.
whether it applies to tropical forests because of the sheer size of the task. Tropical forests have thousands of plant species that may have hundreds of plant-eaters each.
These millions of interactions need to be taken all into account to show the Red Queen hypothesis at work.
Tropical forests have been studied well but there is no comparable data from the temperate regions which would be needed as a control to validate the hypothesis. Perhaps such an arms race also occurs in temperate regions that have been studied less.
but to go out in a tropical forest search for plants and their herbivores and then record their interactions.
Research by U s. Forest Service biologist Rob Venette suggests that temperatures below minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 29 degrees Celsius) will kill 79 percent of emerald ash
just as hard as animal species. Fossils from the late Permian show that huge conifer forests blanketed the region.
The forest isn't actually growing the Nature study reports. Instead changes in shadow length from June to October made leaves seem greener throwing off growth estimates.
We think we have uncovered the mechanism for the appearance of seasonal greening of Amazon forests shadowing within the canopy that changes the amount of near-infrared light observed by MODIS lead study author Doug Morton of NASA's Goddard Space Flight
and the forest canopy is shadow-free and highly reflective in the infrared. That makes it appear very green according to satellite vegetation algorithms
though in reality the forest canopy hasn't actually greened the study found. Without tree shadow the forest looks brighter and greener to the MODIS sensors.
Around the equinox the MODIS sensor takes the'perfect picture'with no shadows Morton said.
This seasonal change in MODIS greenness has nothing to do with how forests are changing. After correcting for the shadowing effect the increase in greening during the dry season disappears.
It turns out that the Amazon forests maintain a fairly constant greenness and canopy structure throughout the dry season the study finds.
It carries this protection with it as it traverses the entire country from the forests of Mexico to the wildflowers of Texas through the prairies of the Midwest and back again.
and overwinter in the forests of Mexico has dropped to an all-time low. News out of Mexico puts the population at 33.5 million individuals.
She also photographed 2000-year-old brain corals off the coast of Tobago and 13000-year-old underground forests of dwarf mobola trees with crowns of leaves poking above the surface of South african soil.
which were swallowed later by the forest after the European invasion caused the population to collapse.
whether early Amazonians had a major impact on the forest. They focused on the Amazon of northeastern Bolivia where they had sediment cores from two lakes nearby major earthworks sites.
In fact the Bolivian Amazon before about 2000 to 3000 years ago looked more like the savannas of Africa than today's jungle environment.
which reveals that the diggers of these ditches created them before the forest moved in around them.
Biodiversity of the Amazon (Photos) Questions answered The discovery that the human activity came before the forest answers some questions like how Amazonian people could have built in the rainforest with no more than stone tools (they didn't have to) how many people would have been necessary to construct the structures (fewer than
and the forest can coexist. Ancient history could provide a guide as well as a greater understanding of how the forest has recovered from earlier perturbations.
The Amazon also drives climate as well as responds to it thanks to its ability to take up carbon from the atmosphere.
It's very likely in fact that people had some kind of effect on the composition of the forest Carson said.
The more beef Americans eat the worse global warming gets said Doug Boucher director of UCS's Tropical forest and Climate Initiative.
and lax laws in many regions that have allowed a sometimes shady network of producers to clearcut vast swaths of tropical forests to make way for palm-oil plantations.
The clearing of those forests not only harms the habitat of many endangered species it releases huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere that those forests had stored formerly.
While tropical forests store vast amounts of carbon the peat soils on which some of these forests grow often contain some twenty times more.
In fact the peat soils in Southeast asia store as much carbon as all aboveground vegetation in the Amazon.
Scientific analysis has shown that through a combination of efforts such as improving yields through tree breeding and better management practices worldwide palm oil demand can be met until 2020 without further damage to tropical forests or peat lands.
while safeguarding tropical forests. Many other companies however have yet to make similar commitments. Among the most important laggards:
Multinational companies really hold the world's tropical forests in their hands said Calen May-Tobin lead analyst for UCS's Tropical forest and Climate Initiative.
while doing something that can save tropical forests and help limit the severity of climate change.
Then I returned to the jungle for another successful treatment. To some the term shaman may conjure up images of tricksters more than healers.
unless the forests are preserved intact. In the spirit of the interconnectedness of all things the Amazon Conservation Team launched to protect the forests preserve the tribal populations
and their cultures and knowledge and along the way hopefully discover new medicines from nature.
Study researcher David Greenwood of Brandon University in Manitoba and his colleagues were quarrying for plant fossils in the lakebed shales of Driftwood Canyon Provincial Park
and some teeth belonging to a previously unknown species of hedgehog dubbed Silvacola acares from the words for tiny forest dweller in Greek and Latin.
Greenwood and his colleagues found it in coal-rich rock beds in the park the site of a swampy spot in the Eocene
A forest of mixed conifer and broadleaf trees carpeted Northern British columbia with palms and spruce living side-by-side Eberle said.
and they can be found in rain forests mountains farmland woods and cities. Bats have two strategies for weathering the cold.
Leaf matter used to construct the nest cells likely came from trees not far from the nest site suggesting the La Brea Tar pits had a nearby forest possibly containing streams or a river.
We can t have prairie without fire Jason Hartman of the Kansas Forest Service told NASA's Earth Observatory which released the satellite image today (April 9).
</p><p>The Middle Fork Clearwater and a tributary the Lochsa river flow through the Clearwater National Forest in Idaho and provide sanctuary for<a href=http://www. livescience. com/11267
Legal battles have determined that the Forest Service has the authority to ban megaload transport through the area
Gray Wolves, Timber Wolves & Red Wolves Wolves are large carnivores the largest member of the dog or Canid family.
They tend to live in the remote wilderness though red wolves prefer to live in swamps coastal prairies and forests.
Beneath the lush forests of the Amazon is a whole different level of diversity that new research says may be one of the keys to understanding how to stem the global impacts of deforestation.
There are 100 million microorganisms in a single gram of forest soil making them the largest repository in the world of novel genes.
They decompose dead organic matter through a process called mineralisation releasing mineral nutrients that plants absorb through their roots allowing the forest to grow.
Owing to its size the forest absorbs 1. 5 billion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere every year making it the largest terrestrial sink of this greenhouse gas.
and the forest s capacity to sequester carbon dioxide. The process of deforestation is causing an addition of 1. 6 billion tons of CO2 to the atmosphere per year substantially increasing greenhouse gases.
Our examination revealed that approximately 50%of Amazon s abandoned pastures are going through secondary forest formation.
and when it happens diazotrophic communities tend to return to similar composition of the former forest.
Coniferous trees in the Genus agathis which are sought after for their soft wood have thick trunks and can grow up to 200 feet (60 meters) tall.
Fossil Forest in the Canadian Arctic Wilf added that fossils of the tree had previously been uncovered in Australia
#World's Largest Trees Help Explain California Forests'Bald Spots Trees in California's Sierra nevada mountains including giant sequoias need sunlight water
The findings help explain the surprisingly patchy growth patterns in one of the most productive forests in the world.
The findings also revealed that the soil-covered forest groves were eroding more quickly than nearby bare granite.
But until now scientists didn't realize how strongly rock type controlled forest growth patterns in the Sierras.
Hahm and his co-authors linked the pluton boundaries to the Sierra's patchy forest cover by comparing satellite forest cover data with geologic maps and collecting hundreds of rock samples.
which the western Sierra's trees grow the scientists showed that the plutons caused the starts and stops in the forest network.
What was shocking was that within an area of similar climate the forest varied wildly Hahm said.
One key ingredient in the forest patterns was varied phosphorus which widely between plutons In some cases the trees revealed fine-scale pluton boundaries overlooked by earlier geologic mappers Hahm said.
The Goldilocks zone inhabited by western Sierra forests is predicted to move to higher elevations in the coming centuries as climate change shifts California's temperature and precipitation bands.
As the forests move under changing climate they will also be restricted by rock type Hahm said.
Chewing on wood or twigs keeps their teeth short. Without something to chew on their teeth would grow so long they would injure the roof of the mouth and lips.
Both fires began on private timber lands just west of Bend Oregon and state investigators say the fires were caused human.
The fire has forced closures in Deschutes National Forest as well as the evacuation of dozens of homes in the area.
Overall the fire has burned 6837 acres (2767 hectacres) of brush and timber. The effort to contain the fire is clear from Hansen's image
The Oregon Department of Forestry Incident Management Team estimates that the Two Bulls has cost $2. 4 million to fight so far.
In dense eucalypt forests (such as wet sclerophyll forests) fuel-reduction burning is impractical because of the risk of uncontrollable fires sustained by heavy fuel loads that only become flammable in dry conditions.
Even in more open dry sclerophyll forests extreme fire weather makes reduction techniques much less effective than in milder conditions.
and conifer forests began to recover from the Permian Extinction. Mosses and ferns survived in coastal regions.
They dwell in woodlands tree groves rocky hillsides swamps fields and meadows when they live in natural environments.
Then while working in the Panamanian forest as a biologist Dudley saw monkeys eating ripe fruit
and watching them hatch the strawberry poison arrow frog carries her tadpoles one by one on her back from the rain forest floor up into trees as high as 100 feet.
The largely agricultural study area around the town of Akole did not contain any natural patches of forest
#Forest Elephant Numbers Decline More than 60 Percent in Decade About 65 percent of forest elephants were killed mostly for their ivory across Central africa in the last decade new research finds.
which described the catastrophic 62 percent decline of the region's forest elephants from 2002 to 2011.
At least a couple of hundred thousand forest elephants were lost between 2002-2013 to the tune of at least 60 a day
In their original study the researchers estimated that the population of African forest elephants was less than 10 percent of its potential size only about 100000 individuals were living in an area that historically could have harbored more 1 million.
Nearly 60 percent of the remaining forest elephants can be found in the relatively small West african nation of Gabon according to WCS officials.
About 95 percent of the forests of DRC are almost empty of elephants. Even in protected forest habitats these elephants are threatened seriously by poaching.
In their 2013 paper the scientists said illegal poaching must be stopped and the high demand for ivory must be stemmed
in order to save the forest elephants. Other elephant subspecies are threatened also by poaching for the ivory trade.
In his 2005 book Last Child in the Woods which introduced the world to the term nature-deficit disorder journalist Richard Louv argued that children need to unplug from computers
So this past summer I enrolled my then year-and-a-half-old daughter in a parent-child class at the Brooklyn Forest School in Prospect Park just a couple of blocks from our home.
The forest school one of many across the country that takes the place of traditional preschools and kindergarten classrooms isn't a new concept.
The first forest kindergarten opened outside Seattle in 2007 but programs like this one are becoming increasingly popular.
Learning to build shelter in the woods might be forgotten a kids'game but it's also a survival skill even today.
And although many of my peers grew up building forts in the woods fewer kids are doing that today.
After our forest school session ended the feeling that I could simply make the time to do this sort of stuff with my daughter on my own kept nagging at me.
I thought to employ a lesson from forest school: make mud. I turned over leaves looking for sticks
#Zoo-Raised Gorillas Prefer Forest Sounds Over Chopin (ISNS)--The sounds of a gently babbling stream
The results accepted for publication in the journal Zoo Biology suggest that the forest melodies were more effective at reducing stress-induced habits such as hair-plucking
or when he heard the forest sounds. But his frequency of hair-plucking increased to 35-40%of the time
First Fire-Scorched Petrified Wood Found SACRAMENTO Calif. After serving nearly 30 years as a doorstop for a nuclear physicist a hunk of petrified wood from Arizona has finally been recognized as a one-of-a-kind find.
The 210-million-year-old piece of wood contains the first fossilized fire scar ever discovered researchers reported here this week at the Ecological Society of America's annual meeting.
No one has spotted ever a fire scar on petrified wood before said lead study author Bruce Byers a natural resources consultant from Falls Church Virginia.
That's because the scientists who study petrified wood rarely cross paths with forest fire researchers Byers suspects.
See Photos of the First Fire-Scarred Petrified Wood Fire stone Byers spent two decades staring at his father's 16-pound (7 kilograms) doorstop before realizing it might be from a fire-scarred tree.
The colorful chunk was collected on national forest land where it's legal to take petrified wood by permit according to Byers who has detailed the story on his blog.
The petrified chunk likely came from the Chinle Formation the same wood-rich rock layer that litters Arizona's Petrified forest national park with huge crystallized trees.
Photos of Arizona's Amazing Petrified Forest Decades later Bruce Byers took on a contract to help fire ecology researchers in Colorado's Front Range.
and I learned how important fire scars are in reconstructing the fire history of modern forests Byers recalls.
Afterward on Byers'next visit to his parents'New mexico home the telltale signs of a fire scar jumped out from the familiar piece of petrified wood.
The surviving wood hugs the fire scar growing back over the raw burned inner wood.
His collaborators include the University of New mexico's Sidney Ash who may have looked at more petrified wood from the Southwest than anyone else On earth;
If more evidence for fire damage turns up in ancient wood will ecologists reconsider the impacts of fire on plant evolution?
I think fire has been a selective force in forests since way way back he said.
Research by WCS and multiple partners found a staggering 65-percent decline in the population of African forest elephants between 2002 and 2013.
and pristine qualities that define the Clearwater corridor was further reinforced last month by an assessment released on April 8 2014 by the U s. Forest Service;
When Exxon committed to Route 12 the Clearwater National Forest Service Supervisor Rick Brazell supervisor sent a letter to the state of Idaho signifying concerns about the hastiness of allowing megaload shipments given the lack of analysis
I cannot support authorization of such oversized loads through the National Forest or within the Wild and Scenic River Corridor.
and allowed further transportation of the loads with the Forest Service ultimately backing down. But on the behest of business owners the Nez Perce and regionally environmental organizations U s. Chief District Judge Winmill ruled that the Forest Service acted unlawfully by not managing for the potential impacts to federal resources caused by these shipments
and further halted shipments until a robust environmental and socioeconomic analysis of the impacts was conducted.
or tree holes during the day and then climb into the forest canopy to find their favorite tree fruits at night.
and jump through the tall forest canopy during the day. Also by only searching for tree fruits during the night owl monkeys avoid competing with larger monkeys that spend their days hunting for the same foods.
and pedaled it down dirt paths through the forests and they even mounted it onto a boat to collect images of a section of the Rio Negro the Amazon's largest tributary Google explained on one of its Outreach pages.
The teams then amalgamated more than 2000 still images to create 360-degree panoramas of the Amazon jungle.
Those data are collected periodically by trained forest community members and once it reaches FAS headquarters in Manaus Brazil can be grouped
After the implementation of the community forest ODK monitoring program and the Street view for the Amazon FAS launched a new Web-based platform called Bolsa Floresta Platform to serve as an interactive tool where Bolsa Floresta
the Amazon forest and the culture of its local population Salviati told Livescience. Smartphones tablets and chimps On the other side of the world the Jane Goodall Institute an ape-conservation organization founded by renowned chimpanzee researcher Jane Goodall is leading a similar effort.
and cloud technology to help monitor African forests said Lilian Pintea JGI's vice president of conservation science.
and the forests and take photos documenting the most important threats Pintea explained. The villagers also document the presence of more than 20 species with a focus on chimpanzees for instance
if the forest monitors see an animal or its tracks they take photos with their smartphones he said.
so they can monitor forests and habitats Pintea said. Through this data-collection process the JGI has identified previously unknown threats to chimpanzees.
Even in the first few weeks of a forest villager getting his smartphone he reported this trap designed to capture a live primate we think either a baboon
In the future Pintea hopes to use imagery of the region gathered over the years to track changes in the forests over time.
Eyes on the Forest Other endangered species like the tiger are threatened also by poaching and habitat destruction.
and the Indonesian Ministry of Forestry captured images of 12 tigers in Sumatra in an area that was set for deforestation.
along with a coalition of nongovernmental organizations called Eyes on the Forest worked with Google to build a catalog of maps detailing the changes in the region over time including shifts in the forest cover;
and floral diversity according to a statement from Eyes on the Forest. Through this effort the organizations hope to illustrate how deforestation in Sumatra fueled by demand for products like palm oil
and its forest-dwelling creatures. It will also allow consumers to make informed decisions on the products they buy as the map can show where a pulp
and then gradually the forests will come back and with them tiger populations. Elephant tracks Despite many efforts to curb elephant poaching including a 1989 agreement among CITES (Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species of Wild Fauna
and a forest ecologist with the U s. Geological Survey (USGS) in Three Rivers Calif. The results of the survey of 403 tree species around the world suggest that trees never suffer the ill effects of old age.
Missing trees for the forest The findings turn conventional forestry wisdom on its head. It had always been suspected
The evidence came from measuring carbon trapped by forests. Overall a forest full of whippersnappers sucked more carbon from the atmosphere than a same-sized acreage filled by elderly trees.
Trees store carbon in their tissues such as wood bark and leaves. So scientists assumed the older trees were growing more slowly
and that's where the rub comes in said Todd Dawson a forest biologist at the University of California Berkeley who was involved not in the study.
because forests showed a decline in productivity as they grew older. But this is a really fun finding
and address this issue. 670000 trees can't be wrong Gathering forestry experts from six continents Stephenson
The findings do not mean scientists need to rejigger their models for how forests remove carbon from the atmosphere though.
As earlier research shows on a forest-wide scale younger forests capture more carbon simply
whether managing forests so they contain more old trees would help trap more carbon (making the forest a carbon sink).
Foresters have assumed always you need to be managing for young age because young trees grow faster than old trees
but they didn't know trees keep growing Dawson told Livescience. If you want a forest to be a carbon sink you may want to manage it to make sure you always have a lot of older trees in it.
Email Becky Oskin or follow her@beckyoskin. Follow us@livescience Facebook & Google+.+Original article on Livescience e
It was a moist temperate forest mostly of conifer trees and gingkos with dry hot summers and pretty cold winters.
since overrun entire ecosystems destroying native long-needled pine forests woodlots and grasslands alike. In addition to the damage it inflicts by overwhelming other plants kudzu has indirect effects as well.
Tharayil and Tamura investigated the impact of a kudzu invasion in native pine forests. They found that the invasion actually increased the amount of leaf material contributed to the soil
but despite this soil carbon decreased by nearly a third in those forests. Tharayil and Tamura attribute the release of carbon from kudzu-invaded forests to the fact that kudzu adds material to the soil that is susceptible to degradation relative to that produced by pine.
Simply put kudzu leaves and stems are easy for microbes to degrade pine needles and stems are not.
The net result of these three effects is that plant material is degraded more rapidly it doesn t persist like it did in the pine forests.
The impact of kudzu invasions on the release of former pine forests could be substantial.
This is the equivalent of the amount of carbon stored almost 5m hectares of forest or the amount of carbon released by burning 2. 3m tonnes of coal annually.
And because we live deep in the backwoods of Dent County Missouri where the sky is very dark one has to hunt for good low horizons.
Every piece of usable timber walnut red and white oak and pine had been removed from this land and sold to the lumber market.
and anyone strong enough to turn some of the worst land in Missouri into a building site for a home in the backwoods.
Where I live deep in the backwoods the skies are very dark and all kinds of animals mountain lions bears and the like roam the darkness of our neighborhood.
I stumbled through the forest attempting to find a path I knew was there. It didn t take that long to find the decaying bridge now being overtaken by blackberry and multiflora rose.
Despite this lack of recognition millipedes go about their daily routines as recycling machines on the forest floor.
and feeding on dead leaves and other detritus that accumulates on the forest floor. Millipedes return nutrients to the ecosystem
and keep dead leaves from piling up in the forest. Though millipedes aren known t for their beauty perhaps they should be.
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