For example, the Brazilian fruiting tree known as strawberry guava (Psidium cattleianum), which runs riot all over the Hawaiian islands, is thought to have jumped the fence from the Harold L. Lyon Arboretum in Honolulu in the early 20th century.
and trees that visitors see at botanic gardens. Hulme says some showy but potentially invasive species
such as the African tulip Tree (Spathodea campanulata) are planted commonly in a bit of laziness because everybody likes them.
plenty of pretty trees that don't have a tendency to run wild.
Funding to help save plant diversity secured: Nature Newsan international treaty aimed at protecting and improving access to the world's plant genetic resources has obtained more than US$10 million from donors to fund its second round of research grants for helping
and on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra to make way for oil-palm plantations by the early 2000s,
Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1, the study is the first attempt to systematically assign a value to the carbon loss due to peatland destruction in Southeast asia that can be attributed directly to conversion to oil-palm plantations.
For the first 25 years after an oil-palm plantation is established in a peat-swamp forest,
Koh and his colleagues note that by the early 2000s almost 90%of oil-palm development in Southeast asia had taken place in non-peat areas;
and in Peninsular Malaysia, 38%,35%and 27%,respectively, of peat-swamp forest had been converted to oil-palm plantations by the early 2000s.
Koh and his colleagues found that the conversion to oil-palm plantations had put four species of bird at risk of extinction in Borneo,
because the planting of oil palms accelerated rapidly after 2002 together with forest clearance, although the two have not been correlated as in this study.
A previous attempt at quantifying peat-forest conversion to oil-palm planting was made by the nonprofit organization Wetlands International for the Malaysian state of Sarawak on Borneo.
nearly 33%of the peat-swamp forests in the state had been cleared, more than half for oil palms.
Conway heralded the'fertilizer trees'Faidherbia albida as the future, particularly for farmers in Africa.
These trees, which reintroduce nitrogen to the soil, have been shown to quadruple African maize yields in soils with no artificial fertilizer added.
and improving the quality of tree cover in existing forests, according to a plan approved by the Prime minister's Council on Climate Change on 23 february.
Carbon-rich mangroves ripe for conservation: Nature Newsmangrove forests in tropical regions of the Indian and Pacific oceans store more carbon than previously recognized,
the amount of carbon in mangroves has been ignored largely, even though they are present in more than 100 countries.
To estimate the abundance of carbon in mangroves, lead investigator J. Boone Kauffman, an ecologist at the Northern Research Station of the US Forest Service in Durham
New hampshire, and his team sampled 25 mangrove sites across a broad territory that included Micronesia, Indonesia and Bangladesh.
This area spans 30 degrees of latitude and 73 degrees of longitude and represents about 40%of the global area covered by these trees.
Kauffman and his team assessed aboveground and belowground carbon pools in mangrove sites occupying estuaries and oceanic settings, such as island coasts.
accounting for more than 70%of total carbon stores in estuarine mangroves and upwards of 50%in those in oceanic zones.
and at the current rate of annual clearance, emissions from mangrove destruction could reach 40%of those from the clearing of peatlands.
and understanding the significant pool of carbon in mangrove ecosystems, says Shimon Anisfeld, an expert in coastal ecology at Yale university in New haven,
Hopefully, it will help arguments to extend REDD+to mangroves, she says, referring to an international plan to pay developing countries to preserve forests in a bid to help reduce global carbon emissions.
Nature Newsa scheme to pay people in developing countries to curb carbon emissions from deforestation is plagued by'leakage'trees that aren't cut down in one forest are just cut down in another to provide people with the resources they would have foregone.
and fuel-so that fewer trees need to be cut down. To be smart about using money to store carbon
and thereby keeping carbon in the trees. The programme is currently providing support to 13 countries,
Nature Newsradiation released by the tsunami-struck Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant could have long-lasting consequences for the natural environment in the vicinity of the damaged Plant scientists estimate that in the first 30 days after the accident on 11 march, trees,
rodents and trees-in particular pine and spruce. The reported values are written not in stone but they're definitely plausible,
Deforestation surges in the Amazon Brazil's environment minister Izabella Teixeira has vowed to crack down harder on loggers clearing trees in the Amazon rainforest, after a sudden rise in deforestation.
measures include electronically tagging trees (pictured. But none of the six countries that have signed the pacts has started yet producing licensed timber.
prevent a large-scale outbreak of the fearsome desert locust (Schistocerca gregaria. The grasshoppers have infested already Saudi arabia's Red sea coast.
Special locust squads, guided by satellite data to the breeding grounds, have sprayed more than 90,000 hectares since January.
The Food and agriculture organization of the united nations (FAO) in Rome issued a locust outbreak warning earlier this month saying that political instability could prevent effective control of the locusts in the interior of Yemen. We are following the situation,
but until now we haven't been able to move into those areas owing to security problems,
director of Yemen's locust programme in Sana'a. Response teams have the resources they need,
Locusts lay their eggs in moist, sandy soils and flourish when the desert blooms. If the breeding gets out of control,
which the locusts follow the wind and devour everything in sight. Such swarms threaten agricultural production in some 50 countries across the Middle east, northern Africa and the Indian subcontinent.
when locust swarms from the Sahel darkened the skies over Cairo and devastated crops across Africa.
senior locust forecasting officer with the FAO, is that the danger of an uncontrolled outbreak in Yemen is declining as the country heads into its dry season.
and the kind of rainy spell that would significantly boost the locust population is becoming less likely.
Wind could still carry the locusts across the Red sea and into northern Sudan (see'Breeding grounds'),
Cressman says that agricultural officials there should be able to control locusts throughout most of northern Sudan.
Locust controllers can call on increasingly sophisticated tools, including regional weather forecasting and satellite imagery for tracking rainfall and vegetation as well as hand-held global-positioning-system devices to monitor progress in the field.
and along ephemeral streams, says Pietro Ceccato, a remote-sensing scientist at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society who works with the FAO's locust team at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty
carbon storage in the trees and soil, and recreational value. Woodlands are clustered around the Cambrian Mountains in central Wales.
the Cambrian Mountains are almost perfectly the wrong place to plant trees, says Bateman. The area is made up of peat land,
Planting trees here would disrupt the peat carbon sink and result in more carbon being emitted than is locked up in the trees.
The report's authors call on the government to use their findings and value analyses to guide future policy-making.
Nature Newsfor tropical ecologist Greg Asner, it's all about seeing the forest through its trees.
Over the past two years, he and his team at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, California, have used world-class tree climbers, bows and arrows,
With the digital catalogue as a reference, Asner hopes that the observatory will be able to perceive the species of many individual trees by their optical properties,
In specimens from one region of the Amazon rainforest in southern Peru, Asner and his wife, Robin Martin, identified 21 spectral traits that provided identifying signals for 90%of the species. A lot of people look at trees
and discovered that an invasive ginger plant was competing with native trees for the nutrient.
The ground plots provide a record of how each tree in the area fared through the drought,
and Asner's crew should be able to pick those trees out of their broader analysis to look for any lingering effects.
The hypothesis is that those trees that have suffered during the drought also have different canopy chemistry,
In many parts of the western United states, especially those blanketed with conifer forests, raging wildfires are part of the landscape.
Some areas now covered with trees could be transformed into grasslands or meadows the researchers contend.
says that some tree species common in Yellowstone are adapted well to fire. For example, the lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta) depends on blazes to help it regenerate.
I suspect that lodgepole pine will have a happy future in Yellowstone even if fires become more frequent,
says Whitlock.
Transgenic grass skirts regulators: Nature Newswhen the US Department of agriculture (USDA) announced this month that it did not have the authority to oversee a new variety of genetically modified (GM) Kentucky bluegrass,
Ancient sea jelly makes tree of life wobble: Nature News A 580-million-year-old fossil is casting doubt on the established tree of animal life.
The invertebrate, named Eoandromeda octobrachiata because its body plan resembles the spiral galaxy Andromeda, suggests that the earliest branches in the tree need to be reordered,
say the authors of study in Evolution and Development1. The researchers, led by paleontologist Feng Tang of the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences in Beijing,
And that would support a rewrite of the animal tree. Comb jellies sit alongside two other major groups near the base of the tree,
but their relative positions remain contentious. Normally, sponges are identified as the first to evolve, followed by the cnidaria jellyfish, sea anemones and their kin and then by the comb jellies.
The proposal is in tune with DNA studies that place comb jellies closer to the root of the evolutionary tree.
Other'hits'included DNA from legumes, ginger, walnut and juniper and from herbs such as mint, thyme and oregano.
a crack at least 18 miles long in Pine Island Glacier, which sticks out from the Amundsen Sea coast on the west of the continent.
Pine Island Glacier is rapidly retreating, accounting for a large part of West Antarctica's ice loss.
200 volunteers (all HSBC employees) to measure tree growth, study the decomposition of leaf litter on the forest floor
"The number of tree species in some of the plantation forest plots approaches that of the primary forest,
A survey of 12 one-hectare plots across a rainfall gradient that runs through evergreen and deciduous forests in the Indian state of Karnataka found a high density of trees producing'non-timber
He now says that the value of increased manpower is obvious the volunteers have measured more than 150,000 trees,
Scientists fear that the altered'forest code'would weaken rules on tree-clearing that have reduced deforestation in the Amazon.
Amgen, based in Thousand Oaks, California, posted US$15. 1 billion in sales last year; its products include biological drugs for rheumatoid arthritis and anaemia.
and to the kitchen, where he is keen to try the flavour combinations that arose during his analysis. In particular he wants to combine coffee and garlic.
coffee is used often as a replacement for stock. It might take some convincing, however, for coffee shops to start offering a garlic shot with their cappuccinos
'which scientists fear will weaken strict rules on tree-clearing that have reduced deforestation in the Amazon.
Ash-covered forest is'Permian Pompeii'An ancient swampy forest full of long-extinct plant species has been brought to life through analyses of well-preserved fossils entombed in a layer of volcanic ash.
comes from a smothering layer of volcanic ash. Pfefferkorn and his colleagues have unearthed one such time capsule from 298-million-year-old rocks in northern China a'forest Pompeii'where the weight of falling ash ripped leaves from twigs,
toppled trees and then buried the lot. The consistent thickness of ash deposits in the region
as well as the size of individual ash particles, suggest that the volcanic blast occurred more than 100 kilometres away.
The researchers reconstructed the ancient ecosystem by analysing the positions of individual plants across three sites that together cover more than 1, 000 square metres.
Species from six plant groups lived there, Pfefferkorn and his team report online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1.
the peat forest contained trees that looked like feather dusters, with trunks twice the height of telephone poles;
vines and three species of an enigmatic group called Noeggerathiales small spore-bearing trees that scientists think are close relatives of the earliest ferns."
This could involve accelerated replanting of palm plantations with high-yield varieties in Indonesia, or helping farmers and ranchers to access existing money for sustainable agriculture in Brazil.
says Holly Gibbs, an environmental geographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.""I don't know that it's a sea change yet,
algal blooms and damage to important wetlands, eucalyptus forests and wildlife. To address these problems,
including a poisonous herb called Ephedra and the woody vine Aristolochia. Sometimes known as birthwort, Aristolochia  contains aristolochic acid,
Jenny Tung, a geneticist at Duke university in Durham, North carolina, and her colleagues studied 49 captive female rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta).
Tung and her colleagues analysed blood samples from the monkeys for differences in gene expression. Of the 6, 097 genes tested
potentially heightening susceptibility to disease, says Tung.""That heightened state is more damaging to be in,
says Tung. It was known already that social status can change which genes get turned on and off in insects and fish,
says Tung. Research has shown also the health consequences of low social status on both animals and humans.
says Tung, owing to the greater complexity of our society. The monkey experiment is an"important study,
Tung is now planning an extended study and is hoping to examine how social rank affects the macaques'susceptibility to infection
Million-year-old ash hints at origins of cookinggreatstock Photographic Library/Alamythe plant and animal ash was found thirty metres inside the Wonderwerk Cave beyond the reach of a lightning strike.
and his colleagues found ash of burnt grass, leaves, brush and bone fragments in sediments 30 metres inside the Wonderwerk Cave in the Northern cape province.
The bits of ash, which range from a few millimetres to a few centimetres long, are preserved well. They have jagged edges,
Unlike stone tools, evidence of burning, such as ash and charcoal, is destroyed easily by wind and rain.
and found that the moratorium excludes roughly 46 million hectares of vulnerable rainforest known as mixed-dipterocarp forest.
"The mixed-dipterocarp forests of Indonesia are among the most biologically important and imperilled real estate on earth,
Kior expects to begin producing gasoline and diesel from southern yellow pine trees at its Columbus, Mississippi facility at the end of the year.
and could explain a mysterious spike in carbon-14 levels in that year's growth rings in Japanese cedar trees.
when he heard about a team of researchers in Japan who had found an odd spike in carbon-14 levels in tree rings.
which carbon-14 is formed (see'Mysterious radiation burst recorded in tree rings').'But there was a problem:
the dates indicated by the tree rings. Intrigued, Allen hit the Internet. I just did a quick Google search,
and then by Japan  has roared back into the lead in this month s list of the world s top 500 supercomputers, with the Sequoia machine at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
dead trees and deep pits filled with murky water. Now the government is tightening the screws on illegal mining,
and allow landowners to meet some of their obligations to restore forest with permanent plantations of exotic trees,
such as eucalyptus and oil palm. Brazil s Congress has until September to overturn Rousseff s vetoes with a simple majority of both houses,
"Oil palm is such a lucrative crop that there is almost no way to stop it, says William Laurance, a forest-conservation scientist at James Cook University in Cairns, Australia.
Indonesia, the world s largest grower of oil palms (see Palm sprouts), is expected to double production by 2030.
it is running out of viable land for new oil-palm plantations, according to the US Department of agriculture.
where tree burning and soil degradation release extra stores of the global-warming gas. A recent life-cycle assessment suggested that it could take up to 220 years for a plantation to become carbon neutral (W. M. J. Achten and L. V. Verchot Ecol.
Research published in April also shows that oil-palm plantations are increasingly responsible for deforestation in Indonesia (K. M. Carlson et al.
oil-palm planting directly caused 27%of the region s deforestation in 2007-08. By 2020, around 40%of Ketapang will be given over to palm oil, up from 6%in 2007-08.
He and others are keenly watching how the RSPO handles a flood of complaints filed this spring against a planned 70,000-hectare oil-palm plantation in Cameroon, for example, in
But in the face of what Laurance calls"a green tidal wave of oil-palm expansion,
along with other ways of mapping neurons and neuronal circuits features on the agenda of the 3rd Annual Aspen Brain Forum in Colorado. aspenbrainforum. com
Ranjit Gill of the Forest Survey of India (FSI) claims that illegal felling of valuable teak
and sal trees has devastated supposedly protected forests in the northeast of the country. He and other experts also say that an over-reliance on inadequate imaging by an Indian satellite system is making such destruction easy to overlook.
and then allowed to regrow saplings or bamboo. FOREST & ENVIRON. DEPT, MEGHALAYAON a field survey last year, Gill and three FSI colleagues saw that parts of the Dibru Hills protected forest in Meghalaya had been illegally felled.
000 trees in the area had been cut down in the preceding years, across an area of about 10 â°km2.
the Meghalaya state government claims that only 670 trees were felled in the Dibru Hills forest from 2004 to 2007.
where 60-70%of the tree cover has been lost. The report also found evidence that local forest rangers were involved in the illegal timber trade,
But Wahal admits that the"selective cutting of trees"would not register in the satellite imagery due to the technological limitation of the medium-resolution sensor used for the purpose of forest-cover mapping.
'Tree of life'constructed for all living bird speciesscientists have mapped the evolutionary relationships among all 9,
is an ambitious project that uses DNA-sequence data to create a phylogenetic tree a branching map of evolutionary relationships among species that also links global bird speciation rates across space and time."
"This is the first dated tree of life for a class of species this size to be put on a global map,
and placed all the living species on the tree, starting with the roughly 6, 600 for which genetic information was available.
the researchers used specific constraints such as membership in the same genus to identify where species would most likely be placed in the tree.
They then created thousands of possible tree configurations and modeled estimates of speciation and extinction rates for each one to account for the uncertainty.
"For a tree this size, any small systematic biases in assumptions, integrated over 10,000 species,
Nonetheless, Jetz says that he expects the tree will stand the test of time.""As more sequence data are added,
We hope it will trigger additional efforts to continue improving our understanding of the avian tree of life
roasted aroma of coffee or the golden-brown colour of crispy French fries are enough to set most mouths watering.
Primates were always tree-dwellersprimates love to climb and most make their homes high up in the branches of trees,
yet when this habit started has been a contentious issue. Now, the discovery of some ankle bones is making it look likely that primates were arboreal from the very beginning.
because it is a crucial feature that allows tree-dwellers to readily adjust their feet to the precarious,
Yet why they lived in trees is still being explored.""They weren t being chased up there by dinosaurs.
In September, a group led by Josã Narro Robles, rector of the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico city, presented Pe  a Nieto with a strategy document.
South Pacific coconut gene bank under threatthe international collection of the South Pacific's coconut palm species,
The deadly disease, Bogia Coconut Syndrome, is threatening the survival of a gene bank of region's most important tree
but distinct from, the bacteria that cause the better known Lethal Yellowing disease that attacks palm species. Ironically,
In an attempt to contain the disease, movement of coconuts and coconut palms, both from the gene bank and for commercial reasons,
200 coconut palms, representing 57 different varieties of Cocos nucifera, and is one of five international coconut collections around the world.
One of the first clues that a tropical carpenter ant has become infected with Ophiocordyceps is that it will leave the dry tree canopy
A specialized but global threat The ants best known for getting zombified by the Ophiocordyceps fungus are tree-dwelling carpenter ants found in Brazil and Thailand,
UK unveils plan to fight deadly ash diseasethe UK government today announced an action plan to control the spread of'ash dieback,
but this will not stop the pathogen from killing up to 99%of the ash trees in the country,
Diseased trees in nurseries and those that have been planted newly will be identified and destroyed. Mature trees will be left standing,
as they take longer to die and are valuable to wildlife, Â and can help in the search for naturally resistant trees.
The import ban on ash trees that was implemented at the end of October will remain in place. These measures however, will not eradicate the disease from the United kingdom."
"There is absolutely no magic wand we can wave to make this disappear, UK environment secretary Owen Paterson said at a press briefing in London this morning.
Ash is the third most common tree in the United kingdom, and with as many as 90 million ash trees at risk, the disease threatens to irreversibly change the shape of The british countryside.
This all comes on the heels of the largest tree survey ever undertaken in the United kingdom, in
which 500 staff and volunteers combed through 2, 500 square kilometres of British countryside looking for sites of infection,
It is possible that the disease reached the United kingdom via infected ash timber or imported plants,
where the fungus has ravaged ash trees from Poland to France for more than a decade. On the upside, ash trees reproduce
and grow quickly, with a high capacity for self seeding, so reforestation may not be too arduous.
The main task now is to identify resistant strains of ash a challenge that European scientists are already trying to tackle
cultivated and used to repopulate ash trees across the continent.""If a small number of trees have survived the very intense epidemic in Demark,
then there is hope for us here, says Boyd.""By next season, we could have resistant ash growing as saplings in this country.
Part of the reason it has taken so long to tackle the disease  was confusion in Europe over
Mycologists first attributed ash dieback to Hymenoscyphus albidus, a species endemic to Europe that they thought had developed into a new, more virulent strain.
 When the spores reached European ashes in Poland, the trees had little ability to cope with the pathogen,
and Woodward says that there is little that can be done now.""Estimates of 90%fatality are over-optimistic.
Bare branches, thinned leaves and missing trees showed more roughness. The researchers found that more than 70 million hectares of rainforest in the western Amazon an area nearly twice the size of California were hit by the drought.
Maurice Leponce, Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciencesa"blushing phantom butterfly, Cithaerias pireta, rests briefly on a palm leaf in San Lorenzo forest.
Thomas Martin, Jean-Philippe Sobczak & Hendrik Dietz, TU Munichentomologist J Â rgen Schmidl collects arboreal insects in San Lorenzo forest by fogging trees with biodegradable insecticides.
%Tree felling drops The rate at which trees are being cut down in the Brazilian Amazon has fallen by 27%in the past year, to a record low.
Preliminary work by the National Institute for Space Research (INPE), published on 27 Â November,
Coffee at risk Costa rica has declared a national coffee-growing emergency. The fungus Hemileia vastatrix which causes coffee rust,
looks set to wipe out half the nation s 2013-14 harvest in the most affected areas.
The disease has attacked already coffee crops in South and Central america. See go. nature. com/epwshp and page 587 for more.
Coffee rust regains footholdwhere there is coffee, there is coffee rust. But the long stalemate between growers and the fungus behind the devastating disease has broken with the fungus taking the advantage.
As one of the most severe outbreaks ever rages through Central america, researchers are reaching for the latest tools in an effort to combat the pest,
from sequencing its genome to crossbreeding coffee plants with resistant strains. Caused by the fungus Hemileia vastatrix,
coffee rust generally does not kill plants, but the Institute of Coffee of Costa rica estimates that the latest outbreak may halve the 2013-14 harvest in the worst affected areas of the nation.
This outbreak is"the worst we ve seen in Central america and Mexico since the rust arrived in the region more than 40 years ago,
More than 60%of the trees have at least 80%defoliation, and 30%have no leaves at all.
the Nicaraguan government reportedly declared that it would include coffee rust on a list of special research projects designed to safeguard the country s agriculture.
and more than 90%of coffee crops were wiped out in those regions. Faced with an economic catastrophe
the country abandoned coffee for the tea it is associated with today. The disease is so universal that it"is not going to be eradicated;
or the only way to eradicate the disease in practice is to eradicate all of the coffee,
"Coffee rust was considered a solved problem by most of the coffee growers and coffee institutes of the region,
says Avelino.""People didn t fear the disease. The outbreak may have taken hold because of patchy use and effectiveness of fungicides.
Nigel Cattlin/FLPAHEMILEIA vastatrix rusts the leaves of coffee plants. And in Africa, Noah Phiri, a plant pathologist working in Nairobi for the not-for-profit development organization CABI,
Marco Aurelio Cristancho, a researcher at Cenicafã, the National Centre for the Investigation of Coffee in Chinchin ¡
that the government has supported research into developing resistant strains of coffee through crossbreeding. The introduction of resistant strains, together with improved weather monitoring to help predict rust outbreaks,
At the Federal Rural University of Rio de janeiro in Brazil, Valdir Diola is working to isolate resistance genes in coffee
as well as from Kenya, India, Rwanda, Uganda and Zimbabwe, to screen for resistant coffee plants and to analyse varieties of the pathogen."
"Scientists need to continuously develop resistant varieties in order to keep coffee leaf rust disease at bay, Phiri says."
"Governments in coffee-growing countries need to take coffee research as a priority and provide necessary resources.
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