Global warming is changing the movement of carbon within northern ecosystems to the point where the Arctic could become a net source, rather than sink, of greenhouse gas emissions.
Forest fires, often the result of land clearing, are becoming a major issue for Indonesia and its neighbours.
EPA/Azwar/AAP
The world’s rainforests are still being slashed and burned at a dizzying rate to make consumer products. But now there are signs of real political will, especially in Asia, to rein in the destruction.
Sophisticated models and supercomputers allow researchers to create a high-fidelity map of the Earth’s trees – and show that we’re losing billions of trees a year.
There are a lot of trees on Earth. But there used to be many, many more.
Clara Rowe
James Whitmore, The Conversation and Eliza Berlage, The Conversation
There are more than three trillion trees worldwide, but that’s only half as many were around at the start of human civilisation according to new research.
The US West – suffering one of the most damaging wildfire seasons this decade – needs to break with current practices to avert more costly and dangerous wildfires in the future.
High and dry: a water-stressed forest in the US Southwest.
Leander Anderegg
Trees are more like us than you might think. They even have a pulse. They just operate over much slower timescales.
In the 1920s and 1930s crews surveyed much of California, collecting information about vegetation. This photo was taken in 1936 by Albert Wieslander.
Marian Koshland Biosciences Library
Scientists in my native state of California were handed a gift: a trove of detailed information about the state’s forests taken during the 1920s and 1930s and digitized over the past 15 years. When we…
The forest is home to animals, birds, plants, and tourist trains.
EPA
Brazil’s Atlantic forest – Mata Atlântica – is one of the world’s great biodiversity hotspots, rivalling even the Amazon. Running on and off for several thousand kilometres along the coast, the forest…
Much of Tasmania’s World Heritage has been sculpted by ice. The extension to the area (currently under debate) adds to all these values.
Simon Lieschke/Flickr
The debate around Tasmania’s controversial World Heritage extension, under review this week at international talks in Doha, has centred on forests. But the area includes far more than “just” trees — including…