In the 1970s, red spruce was the forest equivalent of a canary in the coal mine, signaling that acid rain was damaging forests and that some species, especially red spruce, were particularly sensitive to this human induced ...
Environment
Aug 30, 2013
4
0
When the 2020 Labor Day Fires torched more than 300,000 hectares over the span of two weeks in parts of western Oregon and Washington, they devastated communities and put the threat of west-side fires squarely into focus. ...
Environment
Jun 25, 2022
7
118
For a century, scientists have watched European gypsy moth caterpillars infected with a virus use their last strength to do something that a healthy gypsy moth caterpillar would never do in daylight hours – climb high ...
Plants & Animals
Sep 8, 2011
4
0
A clean white plastic flume in an Iowa soybean field is testimony to a novel and possibly heretical idea: prairie plants, once plowed under by farmers growing corn and soybeans in the Midwest, yield benefits for farmers as ...
Environment
Oct 2, 2017
0
336
Nitrogen in rain and snow falls to the ground where, in theory, it is used by forest plants and microbes. New research by a scientific collaboration led by the USDA Forest Service shows that more nitrogen from rain and snow ...
Environment
Mar 15, 2019
0
437
The long-term effects on forests of more extreme climate events, plus other drivers of forest change, are highly uncertain. A new study of the tropical forests across Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands (USVI), spanning ...
Plants & Animals
Mar 15, 2023
0
70
In the snowy spring of 2009, Portland-based Marcot traveled with several colleagues onto the frozen Arctic Ocean north of Alaska to study and survey polar bear populations. These findings may have implications for citizens ...
Ecology
Dec 21, 2010
18
0
Wood is infinitely useful. Critically important for our changing climate, trees store carbon. When trees are harvested for wood products like lumber, some of that carbon continues to be stored. Even after a wood product is ...
Environment
Aug 11, 2022
0
85
U.S. Forest Service researchers have identified what may be a key to unraveling some of the mysteries of White Nose Syndrome: the closest known non-disease causing relatives of the fungus that causes WNS. These fungi, many ...
Plants & Animals
Jul 25, 2013
1
1
Alaska is on the front lines of climate change, experiencing some of the fastest rates of warming of any place in the world. And when temperatures rise in the state's interior—a vast high-latitude region spanning 113 million ...
Ecology
Jan 3, 2024
0
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