News tagged with national forest

Study characterizes 300-million-year-old tropical forest preserved in volcano ash

(PhysOrg.com) -- Pompeii-like, a 300-million-year-old tropical forest was preserved in ash when a volcano erupted in what is today northern China. A new study by University of Pennsylvania paleobotanist Hermann ...

Space & Earth / Earth Sciences

created Feb 20, 2012 | popularity 5 / 5 (10) | comments 1 | with audio podcast

Handful of heavyweight trees per acre are forest champs

Big trees three or more feet in diameter accounted for nearly half the biomass measured at a Yosemite National Park site, yet represented only one percent of the trees growing there.

Space & Earth / Environment

created May 02, 2012 | popularity 5 / 5 (5) | comments 0 | with audio podcast

Carbon emissions from peat-swamp forest clearing quantified

(PhysOrg.com) -- Peat-swamp forests in Southeast Asia are being cleared to make way for food production and for oil-palm plantations for biofuel, but now a new study has quantified the resultant carbon emissions ...

Space & Earth / Environment

created Mar 08, 2011 | popularity 4 / 5 (5) | comments 0 | with audio podcast report

Giant Sequoias Yield Longest Fire History from Tree Rings

(PhysOrg.com) -- California's western Sierra Nevada had more frequent fires between 800 and 1300 than at any time in the past 3,000 years, according to a new study led by Thomas W. Swetnam, director of UA's ...

Space & Earth / Environment

created Mar 17, 2010 | popularity 4.9 / 5 (9) | comments 22 | with audio podcast

Biologist solves mystery of tropical grasses' origin

Around 30 to 40 million years ago, grasses on Earth underwent an epic evolutionary upheaval. An assemblage capitalized on falling levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide by engineering an internal mechanism to concentrate the ...

Biology / Plants & Animals

created Feb 08, 2010 | popularity 4.6 / 5 (5) | comments 0 | with audio podcast

Wolves, moose and biodiversity: An unexpected connection

Moose eat plants; wolves kill moose. What difference does this classic predator-prey interaction make to biodiversity?

Biology / Ecology

created Nov 02, 2009 | popularity 4.9 / 5 (7) | comments 4

Forest structure, services and biodiversity may be lost even as form remains

A forest may look like a forest, have many of the same trees that used to live there, but still lose the ecological, economic or cultural values that once made it what it was, researchers suggest this week in articles in ...

Space & Earth / Environment

created Oct 03, 2011 | popularity 5 / 5 (4) | comments 0 | with audio podcast

The case of the dying aspens

Over the past 10 years, the death of forest trees due to drought and increased temperatures has been documented on all continents except Antarctica. This can in turn drive global warming by reducing the amount of carbon dioxide ...

Space & Earth / Environment

created Dec 12, 2011 | popularity 5 / 5 (5) | comments 4 | with audio podcast

New NASA map reveals patterns of tropical forest carbon storage

A NASA-led research team has used a variety of NASA satellite data to create the most precise map ever produced depicting the amount and location of carbon stored in Earth's tropical forests. The data are ...

Space & Earth / Environment

created May 31, 2011 | popularity 4.5 / 5 (4) | comments 7 | with audio podcast

Ecologists discover forests are growing faster

Speed is not a word typically associated with trees; they can take centuries to grow. However, a new study to be published the week of Feb. 1 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has found evidence that f ...

Space & Earth / Environment

created Feb 01, 2010 | popularity 4.7 / 5 (28) | comments 19 | with audio podcast

Satellites reveal surprising connection between beetle attacks, wildfire

If your summer travels have taken you across the Rocky Mountains, you've probably seen large swaths of reddish trees dotting otherwise green forests. While it may look like autumn has come early to the mountains, ...

Space & Earth / Environment

created Sep 08, 2010 | popularity 4.8 / 5 (5) | comments 0 | with audio podcast

Oil palm surging source of greenhouse gas emissions

Continued expansion of industrial-scale oil palm plantations on the island of Borneo will become a leading cause of greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 unless strong forest and peatland protections are enacted and enforced, ...

Space & Earth / Environment

created Apr 26, 2012 | popularity not rated yet | comments 7

Saving tropical forests: Value their carbon and improve farming technology

(PhysOrg.com) -- In a warming 21st century, tropical forests will be at risk from a variety of threats, especially the conversion to cropland to sustain a growing population. A new report this week in the ...

Space & Earth / Environment

created Oct 04, 2010 | popularity 3 / 5 (2) | comments 1 | with audio podcast

Most new farmland comes from cutting tropical forest: researcher

(PhysOrg.com) -- A new study led by a Stanford researcher shows that more than 80 percent of the new farmland created in the tropics between 1980 and 2000 came from felling forests, which sends carbon into ...

Space & Earth / Environment

created Sep 03, 2010 | popularity 5 / 5 (1) | comments 8 | with audio podcast

Follow the money: Wealth, population are key drivers of invasive species

A new study of biological invasions in Europe found they were linked not so much to changes in climate or land cover, but to two dominant factors - more money and more people.

Biology / Ecology

created Jun 07, 2010 | popularity 5 / 5 (1) | comments 2 | with audio podcast