in recent excavations of the galleries Lehner's team found charcoal remains from wood particularly cedar that was originally from the Levant.
and string of all gauges fragments of wood including part of a hammer and other material of the workers.
The remnants of the forest emerged after a storm washed away much of a beach near Bride Village on the island.
The pine forest isn't the only woodland the storms have revealed. At Pembrokeshire in Wales a previously-known ancient forest is exposed more than ever in living memory.
A Mid-january storm pushed sand from the beach at Newgale exposing new portions of the forest as much as 10000 years old according to the Pembrokshire Herald.
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#Pandas'Latest Threat: Horses? The 1600 pandas left living in the wild face a new threat:
and conservationists have focused on limiting forest cutting to save the black-and-white bear. But Hull and her colleagues noticed increasingly that bamboo was vanishing from protected areas.
The mound formed as the result of people continually moving materials such as mud and wood to the settlement for buildings fires and other purposes.
Seven female bison raised in captivity in The british Isles will be reintroduced to a forest in Romania officials with the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (RZSS) announced.
The timbers were sent to the Maryland Archaeological Conservation Laboratory where they would be soaked in water to keep the wood from cracking and warping.
A few timbers were sent back to New york just 20 miles (32 kilometers) north of the World trade center to the Tree Ring Laboratory at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory
and cut thick slices of the wood to get a clear look at the tree rings.
Then to determine where the wood came from the researchers had to find a match between the ring pattern in the timbers and a ring pattern in live trees and archaeological samples from a specific region.
and historic wood samples from the Philadelphia area including a sample taken during an earlier study from Independence Hall
We could see that at that time in Philadelphia there were still a lot of old-growth forests and they were being logged for shipbuilding
And they had plenty of wood so it made lots of sense that the wood could come from there.
Historians still aren't certain whether the ship sank accidently or if it was submerged purposely to become part of a landfill used to bulk up Lower Manhattan's coastline.
Previous investigations found that the vessel's timbers had been damaged by burrowing holes of Lyrodus pedicellatus a type of shipworm typically found in high-salinity warm waters a sign that the ship at some point in its life made a trip to the Caribbean perhaps on a trading voyage.
Found throughout the eucalypt woodlands of Australia koalas are quite solitary animals. Each individual sets up a home range which can span a few acres to hundreds of acres.
#Alaska's'Hidden'Forests Captured in Unprecedented Detail (Photo) In the middle of Alaska a great expanse of forested land bigger than California has remained quite mysterious until recently.
NASA's Earth Observatory released a new high-resolution image of an Alaskan forest near the Tetlin National Wildlife Refuge that has been left off of most maps.
The photo taken on July 10 shows a dense forest of black spruce trees surrounding nearby lakes.
Rare Glimpse of Remote Alaska The U s. Forest Service Inventory and Analysis program the largest network of forest inventory plots in the world does not include 450000 square kilometers (174000 square miles
) of forest in the interior of Alaska simply because it is so difficult to reach Doug Morton a scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt Maryland told the Earth Observatory.
To map the hard-to-reach forests Morton and a group of NASA researchers are sweeping across the Alaskan landscape in a low-flying airplane equipped with a portable imaging system called G-Liht.
and composition of the different plant types that make up the forest and it has thermal detectors that can examine surface temperature
After the six-week mission Morton and the team will combine ground measurements of the forest with the aerial data to create detailed maps of Alaska's forests.
But forests in Landsat images look like green paint strokes. G-Liht can produce photographs at a smaller and sharper resolution:
Determining exactly what is growing in the forests and studying the other measurements collected during the mission could allow scientists to measure how the Alaskan forests are responding to climate change and increasing wildfire frequency.
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and the final arrival of the giant tow truck#did actually hike into the woods
eight slender red maple branches clipped from trees growing in NC State s Hill Forest. I found my way to this particular spot ditch
In those days the forest was cooler. The fevered dog days of summer now average about 1. 4 degrees C (about 2. 5 degrees F) hotter than they did then#nd that should make a difference to the trees
if warming gives scales such a powerful boost in the city global warming could do the same thing for scale insects in rural forests.
I became extremely grateful to scores of plant biologists like the one who archived a foot-long maple twig from Hill Forest in 1971.
if scale insects benefit from warming in rural forests as they do in the city. Furthermore the most heavily infested twigs were had ones that grown at temperatures similar to those of modern urban Raleigh.
Thanks to the careful records of those past plant collectors I was able to track down 20 of the forest sites across North carolina where red maple branches were collected in the#70s#80s and#90s (and only put the truck in a ditch at one of them.
but it s also not time to panic about gloomy scales killing our forests. Although the rural scale insects clearly benefited from warming
If there is one thing that Americans know about the environment of Brazil it is the decimation of Amazon forests for ranching and agriculture.
and where forests line riverbanks and form highways for jaguars and other rare species? This place the Pantanal is the vast low-lying alluvial plain of the Alto Paraguay River one of South america's mightiest waterways
and cordilheira forests patches of forest occupying land just high enough to avoid flooding. These forests provide food (especially fruiting trees) habitat and connectivity to other patches of forest for wildlife.
In some cases these forests form very long corridors across multiple ranches running hundreds of kilometers.
Researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Society have documented use of the corridors by white-lipped peccaries an important indicator species that reveals much about the health of the ecosystem.
and cool bamboo forests of Central asia. Many bears in the Northern hemisphere hibernate when the weather is cold.
Some political leaders believe their countries must cut down forests to develop their economies. But recent experience shows that healthy economic growth is more likely where forests are maintained
and degraded land is restored. Smart governments are now increasingly seeking to protect their forests while accelerating growth.
And yet despite this new understanding and the best of intentions to protect forests the loss continues.
A major reason is that those who know forests best the communities that have lived with them
Some of the strongest advocates for the world's forests are the communities that depend on them for food livelihoods and culture.
A new report by World Resources Institute and the Rights and Resources Initiative finds that strengthening forest rights for forest communities is a valuable tool to protect forests
The research shows that deforestation rates inside community forests with strong legal recognition and enforcement are dramatically lower than forests outside those areas:
An added advantage in protecting community forest rights is that the quality of the forests tends to be better often containing about one-third more carbon per hectare than areas outside community forests.
or enforce community forest rights communities are often powerless to keep external forces such as unscrupulous actors in the timber
and oil industries or illegal settlers from destroying forests. Stronger rights mean less deforestation a lot less.
The report shows that these community forests contain 37 billion tons of carbon more than 29 times that emitted annually by all the passenger vehicles On earth.
Legal recognition of community forest rights and protecting those rights stops this carbon going into the atmosphere.
Extreme Weather Around the World But these community forests account for only about one-eighth of all forested areas
and thus represent only a portion of actual community forests. This means we could save even more forested areas
This is well illustrated in a country like Indonesia where the government has done a great deal to protect the forest
and has introduced a moratorium to prevent new clearing of primary forest and peatland. But despite this moratorium forest loss has proved to be difficult to reduce.
A major reason is that of the estimated 42 million hectares (103 million acres) of actual indigenous community forest only 1 million hectares (2. 4 million acres) have legal
recognition Efforts are now under way in Indonesia where the High court has recognized indigenous ownership of forests
and a new law to implement this ruling is pending in the National Legislature to legally recognize the forest rights of communities.
If implemented and enforced this should result in a sharp decline in forest loss and the carbon dioxide emissions it produces.
The impact of effective forest rights in some cases can be seen from space. Satellite images of the Brazilian Amazon clearly show the difference between communities with rights to forests and those without.
For example outside the border of the designated Parakanp Indigenous Land in central Brazil evidence of deforestation can be seen on WRI's Global Forest Watch online tool as wide pink streaks of forest loss.
But the Parakanp's 350000 hectares (864000 acres) are virtually free from signs of deforestation with a gain in forest cover in some areas.
Why does deforestation stop at the Parakanp border? First the Brazilian government generally protects indigenous peoples'forest rights.
Second indigenous peoples forcefully defend their forest by expelling loggers ranchers and other intruders. Communities must not only have rights in law
but these rights must be enforced. In Papua new guinea for example although almost all forests are recognized as community-owned the government has issued leases to private companies covering about 4 million hectares (9. 8 million acres.
If logged areas covered by these leases could release almost 3 billion tons of carbon dioxide.
Our report finds that existing legal rights for community forests in the Brazilian Amazon and other areas could prevent 27 million hectares (66 million acres) of deforestation by 2050.
Recognizing and enforcing community forest rights is untapped an opportunity with huge potential to curb climate change.
What is needed now is leadership to assure strong community forest rights that can help nations protect some of their most precious
and mammal hair all crowded together in the amber fragments offering a rich view of the 20-million-year-old forest ecosystem.
And that means the buckets may hold a full range of species from the ancient Miocene epoch forest.
because it provides a rare window into life on the forest floor. Trees there appeared either to secrete resin directly from the bases of their trunks
or drop resin from their branches entombing creatures living beneath the forest canopy Heads said.
and that they broke down by their weight the limbs of the forest whenever a entire flock lighted in search of food.
In the eastern deciduous forests of what is now the United states the search for mast was extensive
The immense flocks of passenger pigeons were most abundant in these forests. They make waste whole forest in a short time and leave a famine behind them for most other creatures noted colonial historian Robert Beverly in 1722...
they have never been observed to return to the northern countries in the same way they came from thence
Colonial Americans felled the forests for their wood and to make room for agriculture. They also shot
As forests were felled Although massive hunting events are the popular explanation for the passenger pigeon demise
I side with Argentine scientist Enrique Bucher's interpretation of how the felling of the forests led to disruption of the copious masting phenomenon and the cascading decline of that once hyper-abundant bird.
There was a threshold of forest clearing and mast disruption that meant the end decades before Martha's lonely demise.
Forests remained but not the copious mast. Old world vultures were once abundant highly social and mobile birds.
African Grey Parrots aggregate in tremendous numbers around fruiting trees and at forest openings rich in salts in Central African forests.
while the lowland gorilla lives in the flat dense forests of central and western Africa.
Lowland gorillas live in the forests of central and western Africa in Equatorial guinea Angola Cameroon the Central african republic Congo Gabon and the Democratic republic of the congo.
A tree's fall wardrobe depends on its species. The U s. Forest Service notes that oaks tend to turn red brown
But despite the image of Ebola as a virus that mysteriously and randomly emerges from the forest the sites of the cases are far from random said Daniel Bausch a tropical medicine researcher at Tulane University who just returned from Guinea
Experts were surprised to see that instead of the Taã Forest Ebola virus which is found near Guinea it was the Zaire Ebola virus that is the culprit in the current outbreak.
Biological and ecological factors may drive emergence of the virus from the forest but clearly the sociopolitical landscape dictates where it goes from there an isolated case
Poverty pushes people farther into the forests. Even if the Ebola virus had been circulating in Guinea for some time animals carrying the virus
but rather deep in the forests with little chance of coming into contact with people. However impoverished people tend to move into such territory in search of resources. 10 Deadly Diseases That Hopped Across Species Poverty drives people to expand their range of activities to stay alive plunging deeper into the forest to expand the geographic as well as species
range of hunted game and to find wood to make charcoal and deeper into mines to extract minerals Bausch said.
This increases people's risk of exposure to Ebola virus in remote corners of the forest he added.
An extremely dry season may have triggered the Ebola to break out. The first case of Ebola was identified in Guinea in December 2013 at the beginning of the dry season.
Soon she s sending them on missions to four different ecosystems the Australian desert the Canadian Rockies the Belizean mangrove swamp and the Bornean jungle.
Water buffalo live in the tropical and subtropical forests of Asia. They are named aptly for they spend most of their time in water.
They can live in grasslands savannas swamps lowland floodplains mixed forest and glades but they never roam farther than 12 miles (20 kilometers) from a body of water according to the Encyclopedia Britannica.
The work was based on 76 long-term forest studies, and is published in the journal Science1. Study co-leader Phillip van Mantgem of the Western Ecological Research center in Arcata
For example, a forest that is relatively young starts out with many small saplings, and as the forest grows it also naturally thins out,
until the same space is covered with many fewer, but much larger trees. For this reason, they only looked at plots where the forest was more than 200 years old parts of the forest spared from the axe
since large-scale logging began in the region in the nineteenth century. These trees are continuously dying
but the forest-wide thinning process has finished. Modern fire suppression was ruled also out by looking at the set of forests that have no history of frequent fires.
could vary between different forests. Those in hot, arid regions may be losing trees because of drought stress.
and his team captured may be symptoms of climatic stress that make the forests more liable to such catastrophes.
says Werner Kurz of the Canadian Forest Service in Victoria, British columbia. What the work means for the carbon balance of the Earth is also not as obvious as it may seem.
Recently, it was shown that old forests continue to suck away carbon into their third centuries and beyond2.
But old growth is very complex. It is even less clear what action is called for in the face of the data presented by the study.
and mess around with the forests, you'd probably end up accelerating mortality rates, says co-author Jerry Franklin of the University of Washington in Seattle.
Really, the options that are available are salvage logging of the wood for biomass or long-lived wood products to keep the carbon from the atmosphere,
He mentions control of any invasive species that might take over from stressed forest species, the transport of tree species to colder climes further north and more controlled burns to prepare the forests for more frequent wild fires.
But he adds, No one really knows what to do. All the sudden we are uncharted off into territory.
Secondary forests are worth saving: Nature Newstropical forest that has regrown after clear-cutting can become almost as biodiverse as untouched forest, according to new research.
But some scientists question whether these so-called'secondary'forests can truly forestall the extinction of species left homeless by deforestation.
By comparing preserved and regrown forest in Costa rica, a team led by ecologist Robin Chazdon of the University of Connecticut in Storrs has found that 90%of tree species from the original landscape can also be found in secondary forest.
The results, presented at a tropical biodiversity symposium last week in WASHINGTON DC suggest these regrown areas may be worthy of conservation,
forests may have a chance to recover from agricultural clearing1. One key question is abandoned whether these areas will be able to reassemble the same richness of species as the old primary forest.
Chazdon and her colleagues assessed tree biodiversity changes in northeastern Costa rica by surveying 18 hectares of preserved old-growth forest and 11 hectares of secondary forest,
which ranged from 10 to 45 years old. When they looked for trees with a diameter greater than 10 centimetres,
they found only 59%of the old-growth tree species in the regrown areas. But when they extended their search to seedlings and saplings
But the future is bleak for many secondary forests, says Carlos Peres, a conservation ecologist at the University of East Anglia, UK,
or 200 years necessary to become mature forest. William Laurance, a conservation biologist at STRI, notes that the presence of seedlings doesn't necessarily translate into stable long-term populations.
And most of the regrown areas surveyed by her team are within 100 metres to two kilometres of primary forest,
Just how much secondary forest exists worldwide is a difficult question to answer. Scientists have used satellite data to estimate the amount of forest cover,
but the technology is advanced not yet enough to distinguish between old and regrown trees. Gregory Asner, an ecologist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington who is based in Stanford, California,
and his colleagues attempted to come up with an estimate by searching the scientific literature for regional studies about secondary forest.
About 1. 7%of the world's tropical forest area has been reported as being in regrowth, they concluded.
and other data to calculate that 28%of tropical forests had been logged or were slated for logging. While other studies have tracked logging operations in Africa
When he maps global climate data onto forest area data Wright says, virtually no forest exists in areas with a mean annual temperature above 28 degrees Celsius.
Tropical rainforests average 24 to 26 degrees and are expected to heat up by three degrees by the end of the century.
and his colleagues have suggested that the clearance of forests (which are darker) to make way for croplands
Satellite observations of large methane concentrations above tropical rain forests, which have been interpreted as direct emissions from vegetation3,
however, the forests have increasingly been being replaced by row upon row of rubber trees; from the air, they look like gigantic mazes hemming in the conservation centre.
the Chinese government sent a team of botanists to Xishuangbanna at the time a hinterland where diseases ran rampant to test
says Xu Jianchu, an ethnoecologist at the Kunming Institute of Botany and China's representative at the World Agroforestry Centre,
Satellite studies show that between 1976 and 2003 forests were cleared at an average annual rate of almost 14
000 hectares, shrinking the total forest cover in Xishuangbanna to less than 50%and that of primary rainforests to 3. 6%1, 2. In Xishuangbanna, hydrological systems have been hardest hit.
Using a combination of remote sensing and forest inventory data, Ma Youxin, an ecologist at the XTBG,
Jiang is spearheading a regulatory plan due to be completed next month that would strengthen the control of forests in protected areas
It would also prevent the destruction of'collective forests'those that used to belong to villages but were
in a controversial move by the State Forestry Administration last year, allocated to individual farmers.
such as the World Agroforestry Centre's Making Mekong Connected initiative, are exploring the potential of carbon trading
The day when the forests are gone and rivers dried up would be the end of the XTBG.
what Terry Cannon a social scientist at the University of Greenwich, London calls archetypal ecosystems and livelihood systems so coastal, farming, fishers, people living near forests, drylands, floodplains and so on.
forests and perhaps even deserts soak up carbon dioxide, but definitive descriptions of how much and where have proven elusive.
A forest-management method called prescribed burning is already being tested in Australia, California and Portugal.
This means that the accumulating ground layer of flammable dry wood never gets thick enough to provide a major source of fuel for an enormous fire.
Nature Newsthe tropical forests of South america, Africa and Asia take up and release huge amounts of carbon each year.
How is climate change affecting the growth of the forests? Atmospheric CO2 levels are now 40%above
Scientists who have determined for the first time the drought sensitivity of a tropical forest report in Science1 today alarming results from the Amazon basin:
and after the drought revealed that forest patches subjected to a 100-milimetre decrease in rainfall released on average 5. 3 tonnes of carbon per hectare as trees in the area died.
tropical forests could gradually cease to act as a solid buffer against climate change. How large a carbon sink are the world's tropical forests at the moment?
Scientists estimate that mature tropical forests, which cover about 10%of Earth's land, take up as much as 1. 3 billion tonnes of carbon per year.
This is a substantial amount, equivalent to almost 20%of carbon emissions from fossil-fuel burning. Tropical forest thus accounts for around 40%of the global terrestrial carbon sink.
The good news is undisturbed that old forests keep getting better at sequestering carbon from the atmosphere.
Over the past couple of decades, mature tropical forests in Africa and South america seem to have taken up an extra 0. 6 tonnes of carbon per hectare each year on average2
3. Tropical forests in Asia are likely to have improved their carbon uptake as well, although probably at a lower rate.
How reliable are these figures? Measuring tree growth is notoriously difficult, not least because tropical observation networks are pitifully few, particularly in Africa.
Given the many uncertainties, forests have been excluded from national carbon budgets under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change.
However, data gathered over the past decade suggest that undisturbed old-growth forests in and outside the tropics do indeed continue to grow
There is little doubt that tropical forests have acted as a substantial carbon sink for at least the past couple of decades.
Old-growth boreal forests which were suspected long to be carbon-neutral, have recently been found to keep accumulating carbon as well4.
How long will old forests continue to get better at taking up CO2? That is a key question.
Deforestation and forest degradation, through logging, clearing and fire, are only the most obvious problems.
Between 2000 and 2005, South america and Africa have lost each around 4, 000 square kilometres of forest annually.
But even undisturbed forests cannot continue to grow for ever. Their accelerated growth in recent decades is probably a temporary phenomenon,
What does all this mean for forest management and the politics of climate change? Climate change and deforestation pose a double threat to rainforests.
Keeping alive large amounts of forest will require big areas to remain undisturbed from logging and clearing.
Fragmented forest areas are more vulnerable and more likely to be overrun by climate change.
These forests have given us a subsidy for a long time, but this cannot be taken for granted, says Oliver Phillips, an ecologist at the University of Leeds, UK,
who coordinates the Amazon Forest Inventory Network, which was responsible for the latest study. So when putting a carbon value on them we'd rather be conservative.
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