Forests

"In the 1980s, an ecologist named Thomas Lovejoy conducted an unusual experiment in Brazil’s Amazon rain forest. As loggers moved in with chain saws to clear trees for cattle pasture north of Manaus, he asked them to leave untouched several small “islands” of forest to see how the animals within them fared."

"Eastern larch beetles, tiny burrowing bugs native to Minnesota, are exploding in number across the state’s northern forest and have killed or damaged about a third of the state’s tamarack trees — one of the first clear signs of a rapidly changing climate."

"ELY, Minn. — It is high season in the Boundary Waters, when legions of canoe-carrying trucks transform this small outpost 20 miles from Canada into one of the nation's primary gateways to wilderness recreation."

"U.S. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke announced Wednesday he intends to approve a plan to accept the donation of a 3,600-acre ranch that would open the landlocked Sabinoso Wilderness in northeastern New Mexico to the public."

"A genetically engineered, freeze-tolerant eucalyptus tree is moving closer to receiving approval from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, amid concerns about the tree’s possible negative effects on the environment."

"A scientific debate is intensifying over whether too much money and too many lives are lost fighting forest fires."

"They're called 'ghost forests' — dead trees along vast swaths of coastline invaded by rising seas, something scientists call one of the most visible markers of climate change."

"The European Union's top court ordered Poland on Friday to immediately halt large-scale logging in an ancient protected forest, one of many cases that has pitted the nationalist, eurosceptic government in Warsaw against the bloc."

"The only way to know exactly what’s in a wildfire’s smoke is to sample straight from the haze. So during the Rim Fire in Yosemite—which emitted so much smoke it formed its own clouds—a NASA DC-8 passenger plane and an Alpha fighter jet each crisscrossed through the plume. On both planes, scientists had created an in-flight lab to measure exactly what the fire was producing."