ŷ������

This article and video clip are about small albino redwood trees.



Please post anything else to do with the science of trees here.

The largest and oldest known aspen clone is the "Pando" clone on the Fishlake National Forest in southern Utah. It is over 100 acres in size and weighs more than 14 million pounds. That is more than 40 times the weight of the largest animal, a blue whale. It has been aged at 80,000 years, although 5-10,000 year-old clones are more common. - US Forest Service

Short bio on Pando:


Complete Aspen info:

Thanks Robert!

Douglas firs have been adapting to drier air and soil.

Lightning is sparking more forest fires in the boreal (northerly) forests. A combination of climate change and other factors is making the storms shift and the trees more vulnerable.

Reforesting Iceland.

Reforesting degraded former rainforest land.

Coffee bushes are being crossbred in Colombia to try to produce resistance to coffee rust fungus.
Coffee is the world's largest soft commodity.

NASA will be studying forests in three dimensions by satellite and by plane, to determine heights of trees for the first time from space.

Clare wrote: "NASA will be studying forests in three dimensions by satellite and by plane, to determine heights of trees for the first time from space.

..."

NASA does some amazing science that is far more "inward-facing" than "outward-facing." Unfortunately, these areas don't get much media attention... and our current administration seems determined to undermine them. Sigh...

Studies on diverse forests as opposed to monoculture forests with regard to changing climates.


Foresters have long advised planting a mixed stand, partly because of disease threat and partly because of squirrel damage (not mentioned in the study). Also, broadleaved trees improve the soil while conifers make soil acidic and their needles do not break down for years. Even ten percent of scattered broadleaves through a conifer stand is advised. Not alluded to in the study.

From the Eco-Watch article on forest diversity

"The answer, they found, was mixed. A greater range of diversity in an ecosystem seemed to speed up recovery after an extreme climatic event, but if the event was extreme enough biodiversity alone might not offer much protection."

Might not offer enough protect... Make that more than likely will not offer enough natural protection. Governments, businesses, people with power and wealth will have to divert some of their hoarded profits to protect the environment for any of this to succeed.

Northern California is probably going to lose their recreational abalone industry this year because of a lack of diversity in their coastal waters. The star fish that ate the sea urchins disappeared so the sea urchins ate all the bull kelp so the kelp forests disappeared that the abalone feed on.

A lot of creatures need the kelp forest to survive. Divers were sent out to select areas to clear out the sea urchins so they could grow plots of bull kelp along the coast. The sea urchins moved back in as soon as the divers left. The original plan was to have minimal cost and minimal human interaction. Mother Nature was supposed to do all the work.

Apparently the only way man made kelp forests are going to grow is if people actually work on them everyday. Which will cost a lot of money. But that is where we are. The days of pretending our grandchildren will be the ones faced with hard decisions about the impact of the environment on people's lives is over.

There are now more trees than there ever were in the past 200 years in many parts of New England. These natural stands of trees are great for producing great populations of select types of trees, deer, rodents, ticks, and little else. To become functional again, they will need costly human intervention to increase the diversity.

Re kelp. I recall seeing a programme about the sea otter population dwindling. The sea otter ate the spiny crown of thorns starfish which ate the kelp. With no predators the starfish multiplied. These starfish had a 'brain' in each leg and could regenerate the body from each leg if broken. Divers were volunteering to clear them but had to kill each leg as they went.
Not really relevant to trees but kelp is an underwater forest.

It is all relevant. A forest is a forest, whether it is on the land or in the water. The starfish got killed off by diseases and now the sea urchins are running unchecked and eating all the kelp.

In some ways the urchins are very much like people. If the supply of food gets scarce for sea urchins they develop stronger teeth and bodies so they can eat bigger things. A normal animal would starve faster if it grew bigger while it was starving.

No doubt automation will help in that regard.


Either the undersea robots will deal with urchins or they will let people see where the urchins are concentrated each day.

Pando, the world's oldest inhabitant, a collection of Aspen trees all cloned off the same plant, is having trouble getting new shoots to survive. They are called suckers, and usually people will cut them off of whatever they are growing on, to protect the older parts of the plant, bush, or tree, they are growing on. In Pando's, case, the suckers are what creates the new tree growth and a large percentage of them are being eaten.

Limited human activity in the Aspen's vicinity has created a safe area where there is no hunting, so animals can safely gather there to eat. There are no natural predators like wolves in the area and hunting is restricted to allow the deer hunting industry to remain profitable in the area.

The shoots have a bitter taste to discourage animals from eating the shoots but they still are being eaten anyway. One reason might be that a small group of animals has acquired a taste for the normally discouraging taste of the suckers.

They tried to use fencing around the trees to protect the new growth until it is 6 feet tall but that doesn't seem to be working, probably because the fencing is not sturdy enough or constructed well enough to keep the animals out. It seems like an enclosure is needed rather than a fence, which probably costs extra money.

Or they could import some wolves... worked in Yellowstone.

An excellent book by a forester in Germany about Europe's ancient forests.
The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate �� Discoveries from a Secret World

Clare wrote: "An excellent book by a forester in Germany about Europe's ancient forests.
The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate �� Discoveries from a Secret World
[bookcov..."

Great book! In fact, it was a "Green Group Read" a couple of years back...

2016 Book Reads > The Hidden Life of Trees

Which reminds me, I have to do a new read soon. I will be sure to do that.

If you think of any other good tree books, add them to this thread.

The Man Who Climbs Trees

This was my favourite nonfiction book of 2017.

Thanks to The Guardian for informing me about extensive, barely regulated deforestation in Australia.

Reforesting Iceland in this Nat Geo clip.
The recently planted larch which were thriving are now dying from climate change so new varieties are being grown in greenhouses to see which trees are best adapted to the new normal.

Nice article on how Vermont's sugar maple farmers are affected by climate change, and the future for maple syrup.

In my yard I have seen new seedlings in poor soil get zapped by a dry hot period of a few days during the early spring months. Plants growing in good soil seem to make it through okay.

Fungus killing a keystone species of tree on Hawaiian islands.

If they continue to lose the trees at that rate and since they take a long time to grow back I wonder if they aren't going to look for a faster growing tree to make up for the loss of bird habitats. The long term scheme of things can go two ways, the fungus is temporary and is clearing the way for new growth of the same tree. Or the fungus is clearing the land for some other type of growth more suitable to a changing environment.

Something that doesn't appear to be a disease is killing the Baobab trees in Zimbabwe, Namibia, South Africa, Botswana and Zambia. They are between 1,000 and 2,500 years old, and can live for thousands of years. Could be the changing climate.

Cedar of Lebabon also endangered through climate change.

NASA will be observing how much water is absorbed by trees and other plants, including during times of drought.

The science of peach tree growing is explained here in an excellent article from Inside Climate News.
Climate change is a non-term in Georgia, where the farmers apparently prefer to say it's warm weather. But the peach trees need cold winters to fruit, and they are not getting the cold.

The sound of silence in a forest on the Olympic Peninsula.

Nasa monitoring plant temperatures for water use. The article seems to be stressing crop water management. While important, I wonder if they will be monitoring trees as well. Apparently the trees don't use all the water they draw from the ground. What they don't use gets put into the air to help create rain clouds. I am wondering if all plants do that.

It is commonly thought that rainfall is from water from bodies of water that goes up into the sky and comes back down as rain. Research is looking at the real possibility that not all the moisture that comes down as rain started by evaporation from bodies of open water.

It turns out that a lot of the moisture is getting sucked out of the ground by trees which release that moisture into the air which eventually makes clouds that drop the collected moisture as rain. This is most important for areas that do not have direct links to clouds that were created by water from open bodies of water. Great areas of the planet get rain this way.

As the land is continually deforested, these sources of rain for land locked areas are disappearing. There are around 3 trillion trees. Sounds good. Some places have more trees than they did in the past. Looks good. Problem is for every 5 billion trees that grow by any means, 10 billion disappear for any reason. 3 trillion sounds like a big number, except the Earth once had 6 tillion trees.

The ocean moisture generated rains are increasing but the rains generated by the trees are decreasing. While some areas have over abundant rainfall, other areas are seeing droughts that will continue as the number of trees continues to decrease.

When rain falls on plants, including trees, some of it evaporates off the leaves without getting to ground.
Some of the moisture taken in by plants, including rain and aquifer and surface bodies of water, goes through the tree's or plant's vascular systems, root to stem to leaf, and it gets evaporated out stomata or pits in the leaves which help the plant exhale oxygen.
Some plants like cacti control this process by having tiny leaves and thick stems to store water instead.
The transpiration, which is water leaving the stomata as the plant breathes out through the stomata, does indeed put moisture from the ground into the air.
The combined process of evaporation off leaves and from the stomata is called evapotranspiration.
In this way the tree does indeed pass on rainfall which would otherwise have soaked in at one spot or run off downhill.

Creating a belt of trees along a coast can be done and I've seen the results in a lecture about Portugal. The trees, it has been proven, capture the rain at the coast and bring it inland, so if you keep planting you can bring the moisture progressively further inland.

Recently scientists have found that trees can release chemicals into air, like pheromones, and some of these create nuclei around which raindrops can form, so it is possible for trees to create rain out of airborne moisture.

There's probably thousands of things able to create raindrops.

NASA shows the Amazon rainforest has experienced severe drought. The trees are less able to cope, and wildfires can work from edges in, burning dead trees.

"For scientists on the ground in the Amazon, "The first thing we see during a drought is that the trees may lose their leaves," Saatchi said. "These are rainforests; the trees almost always have leaves. So the loss of leaves is a strong indication the forest is stressed." Even if trees eventually survive defoliation, this damages their capacity to absorb carbon while under stress.

Observers on the ground also notice that droughts tend to disproportionately kill tall trees first. Without adequate rainfall, these giants can't pump water more than 100 feet up from their roots to their leaves. They die from dehydration and eventually fall to the ground, leaving gaps in the forest canopy far overhead."

"Drought from Space
The research team used high-resolution lidar maps derived from the Geoscience Laser Altimeter System aboard the Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat). These data reveal changes in canopy structure, including leaf damage and gaps. The researchers developed a new method of analysis to convert these structural changes into changes in aboveground biomass and carbon. They eliminated pixels showing burned or deforested areas to calculate the carbon impact of drought on intact forests alone.

They found that following drought, fallen trees, defoliation and canopy damage produced a significant loss in canopy height, with the most severely impacted region declining an average of about 35 inches (0.88 meters) in the year after the drought. Less severely affected regions of the forest declined less, but all continued to decline steadily throughout the remaining years of the data record.

Saatchi noted that half of the forest's rainfall is made by the forest itself -- water that transpires and evaporates from the vegetation and ground, rises into the atmosphere, and condenses and rains out during the dry season and the transition to the wet season. A drought that kills forest trees thus not only increases carbon emissions, it reduces rainfall and extends dry-season length. Those changes increase the likelihood of future drought. "

Replanting Californian redwood giants further north in Oregon.

A new tree species has been identified and named in equatorial Africa - but it is thought likely that the tree is already extinct from habitat degradation.
To me this looks like a magnolia tree. I would hope that some seedlings are surviving, or some stumps may sprout.

To cheer us up again, here's a nice book on the Japanese art of Forest Bathing. This is easily done in a woodland near you. We learn about the chemicals respired by trees which help our immune systems and the other benefits, including lowered blood pressure and lowered stress.
Other books are available, this is just the one I read. Quite a few pages are covered in simple illustrations so the written content is reduced.

The Joy of Forest Bathing: The Mysterious Japanese Art of Shinrin-Yoku

Autumn foliage - why the bright colours? Why are some years brighter than others?

And just what do we smell during autumn and winter?

Farmers in a rural county in Ireland are worried that there is too much afforestation. They are particulary concerned that the Sitka spruce, a non-native, is overplanted for forestry and is harming the biodiversity of the area.


Sitka can be planted much closer together than hardwoods and the thick branches of evergreen needles shade the ground. The needles, when shed, are acidic and have acidic effect on soil and waterways.

Oregon State University is studying how forestry helps pollinators to survive.

Studying what happens when many trees are felled during a storm, releasing carbon as they rot, but allowing young trees to shoot upwards in their place. And whether major canopy species give way to fast growers. This study looks at Puerto Rico.

Tree crop circles in Japan.

The article about Purto Rico's forest was going along pretty good and the there was this quote, “It seems the risk factors have shifted from what we traditionally thought mattered,�� she said during the press conference. It is more than seems, the guaranteed increased rainfall potentials mean that any place, even the top of a mountain, can temporarily become a flood zone. That's called weather related. The idea of forests being cut down and then restarting is what happened when people around the world kept cutting down forests and converting them into farmland and then into land for human development. We have all profited from how the forests were shifted around and have never questioned that they haven't regrown naturally for the past 500 years. A diverse healthy animal population is an integral part of a functional forest. Forests or what came after forests do not have diverse healthy animal populations in them and haven't for many generations. That makes them dysfunctional carbon sources instead of carbon sinks. The way things are done haven't really changed much before 500 years ago, it just that people's efforts started to engulf the globe at that point. Before then the areas of development were smaller, more isolated, scattered around, and sometimes they didn't even take hold, but that was then. Everything is successfully developed now. It's now a case of successful development versus weather related.

A compilation of articles about deforestation around the world.

A different form of dendrochronology looks at isotopes present in wood.
New tree ring records from Japan show climate shifts through rainfall with periodic (400 years) floods or famines.
Near the bottom we are told:

" Nakatsuka and his colleagues believe history is spotted with many cases of multi-decadal-driven change. Some examples outside of their study are already known. Researchers in the US and Mongolia recently discovered, for instance, that Genghis Khan’s rise to power and conquest of China corresponded to a 15-year period of exceptional rainfall, which provided the great khan with the surplus livestock he needed to support an army. "

Climate change has made it harder for established forest species to renew themselves; showing clearly after Californian fires.

Highly recommended by me.

Trees of Power: Ten Essential Arboreal Allies