Author: Site Owner

By Allie Wisniewski, American Forests

Even though they’re dead, they are not gone — trees find a way to help each other out postmortem. Introducing the nurse log. Defined as fallen trees that provide “ecological facilitation” as they decay, nurse logs offer seedlings shade, nutrients, water and protection from disease and pathogens, thus nurturing and making way for the new generation.

How does it work, you ask? Well, the process begins with a fallen tree’s gradual breakdown of lignin following its death. Lignin is a group of polymers that help form the trees’ structural tissues, especially in wood and bark. Biodegradation of lignin is facilitated by microorganisms such as fungi and bacteria — white rot fungi, more specifically, is responsible for breaking down wood on the forest floor.

As the lignin deteriorates, holes and niches in the bark begin to grow in size and, over time, become filled with soil, moss, mushrooms and small plants. This dark soil is called humus, the nitrogen-rich organic matter that forms when plant and animal matter decay. When moss covers the exterior of the log itself, the decaying process is expedited, and new plant species are more easily supported.

Plants aren’t the only ones that benefit, however. Many small animal species such as squirrels are also known to roost on or in nurse logs, enriching the humus and providing additional fertilization for germinating seeds and sprouts with their food debris and feces.

The nurse log phenomenon is particularly visible in the northwest region of America, where Sitka spruces, hemlocks and Douglas-firs grow in abundance. As seedlings germinated on the nurse logs begin to sprout, their roots thicken as they creep down the log to the soil below. Simultaneously, fungi feast on the decaying tree, leading to the gradual rot of the nurse log that provides even more nutrient-rich sustenance for the young plants. It often takes several decades for a nurse log to decay completely, at which time the seedlings’ roots have become strong and thick enough to support themselves. And there you have it — another cycle begins!

Not a bad system, huh? Deep in the forest, there is always life after death. Nature truly does seem to have it all figured out.

By Doyle Irvin, American Forests

Credit: Kamil Porembinski

There have been five major extinction events since the dawn of our planet’s history, with the earliest occurring 440 million years ago. The end of the Cretaceous era 66 million years ago marks the most recent wipeout, but many scientists are now arguing that we are in the middle of the 6th major extinction of life on Earth.

The evidence for this is staggering — for example, the “natural” extinction rate, without human intervention, is roughly one to five species a year. Studies currently state that 1,000 to 10,000 species are disappearing every year, and that as many as 50 percent could be extinguished by the middle of the 21st century.

That this would not make it the most devastating extinction in history is no relief. Ninety-six percent of life on Earth died out 251 million years ago after an enormous explosion in what is now Siberia. This explosion launched massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, drastically altering the bacterial makeup of the biosphere, which began pumping out methane at lethal levels. The oceans thus became acidic, and started to emit hydrogen sulfide. All of these factors together contributed to what has become known as “the Great Dying.”

We use the example of the Great Dying for multiple reasons. First, each reaction in turn catalyzed the next, displaying how easily one event — say, an excess of carbon in the atmosphere — can spur the next, more drastic reaction. Second, we cite the Great Dying because it is inspiring, in a particularly morbid kind of way, that all the subsequent life on Earth evolved from the scant 4% that survived that event. Life finds a way. Lastly, we cite the Great Dying because, even though some species survived and eventually gave rise to the planet we have today, the extinction event set back life on Earth by about 300 million years.

That time span is beyond biblical in proportion, and equally beyond the easy comprehension of human minds. More comprehensible, and especially relevant to this article, is the story of the Judean date palm. Prominently featured in the Old Testament and other contemporaneous works, we know that the Judean date palm was a cornerstone of the economy in the Levant for roughly 1,500 years. Forests of the trees covered the Kingdom of Judea and fed its citizens. The Romans, correctly understanding the trees to be a keystone for the Judeans, promptly began destroying the trees, as means of conquest, and by 500 C.E., the date palms were driven extinct.

Was that the end of the story for the Judean date palm? Relegated to the annals of history and scriptures? No, it was not the end: life finds a way. Excavations during the 1960s of Herod the Great’s palace uncovered a stash of seeds stored in a clay jar for the last two millennia. They were then put into a drawer for the next four decades, until, in 2005, scientist Elaine Solowey made the decision to plant one — just to see what would happen. Ten years later she updated the world, letting us know that the tree was a dad, successfully pollinating female date trees of other species. Some more of the ancient seeds had also by then been sprouted and identified as female, meaning that a pure strain of this ancient tree could soon be in the works.

Not to be outdone by the Israelis, a team of Russian scientists discovered 32,000-year-old seeds buried under 124 feet of permafrost. Initially failing to germinate them, the scientists then took cells from the placenta of the seeds and grew the Silene stenophylla from a petri dish into an entire, intact flower.

How is this relevant? As we said earlier, human actions have placed the planet squarely into the middle of a sixth extinction. Recent studies have shown that more than 300 tree species are critically endangered, with fewer than 50 representatives of their species remaining. They also state that more than 9,000 additional tree species are threatened by extinction. But, as the examples of the Judean Date Palm and the Silene stenophylla tell us, the story isn’t over yet.

Human intervention restarted these two ancient inhabitants of Earth: life finds a way. We just have to remember that we are life, and we must find the way.

By Melanie Friedel, American Forests

Trees. What a simple concept! They don’t seem to have any worries, standing there grounded by their thick, winding roots. They just get to relax in the sun all day, as far as we can see. But the truth is that trees are working hard behind the scenes from the moment they enter the world until years after their death, and this life cycle is called senescence. We’re going to take a closer look at this cycle and zoom in on what’s really going on in the life of a tree.

It all starts with the seed that forms from the fertilization of a mature ovule, essentially the egg of a tree. With enough support, nature willing, this seed will germinate and become a seedling. In order for this to happen, the seed will need plenty of water so that it can break through its shell and sprout roots. Then the temperature needs to be just right, which for most tree species means waiting for a warm day. Even better though is a warm and sunny day; many seeds need just enough sunlight before it can sprout, and it has to be patient until enough sun peeks through the canopy above it. This might already seem pretty needy for something so small, but the list continues. The seed also needs a steady supply of oxygen to perform aerobic respiration in order to source energy, since it’s too young to grow the leaves that will later produce energy through photosynthesis.

Now, it’s time for the roots. The roots grow from the seedling and spread out inside the surrounding earth, creating the architecture of the tree foundation and the support system that will determine just how big the tree can be. Besides just being vectors for nutrients, roots also release an enzyme called cytokinin, which controls the growth rate of the tree — directly linking the establishment of a healthy root structure to the above-ground development of the tree. Slowly, the tree emerges and eventually grows a stem, branches and leaves. Once it has leaves, it can survive through photosynthesizing, with the help of enough water and sunlight. Flowers begin to grow either before or after the leaves do, depending on the tree. It can take years for a tree to grow to full maturity, but when it’s ready, the flower pollination process begins.

Polli-what?! Pollination: the transfer of pollen from the anther of the flower, where pollen is produced, to the stigma of the flower, where it travels down the innermost parts of the flower (the “female” reproductive portion is burrowed here). Pollen’s journey can sometimes be a long one, and it can’t travel very well on its own. Luckily, it can catch a ride from a dispersal vector — any creature or force that transfers pollen. There are several kinds of dispersal vectors for tree pollen: living (such as bees, bats and some birds), and not-living (such as wind or water). Once one of these friends or forces makes the deposit, the seed is created and on its way to becoming a germinated seedling, and eventually a new daughter tree!

Meanwhile, the parent tree’s life is coming to an end. One of the definitions of senescence is “the process of deterioration with age.” With trees, what frequently happens is that the tree outgrows its ability to obtain enough resources to keep it alive. As its ability to self-maintain falls further and further behind, the tree becomes more susceptible to diseases, pests, storms and other natural predators. Eventually one of these antagonists will claim the weakened tree, and bring it to the ground.  The death of the tree is just as important as (and potentially even more so than) the birth of it. After the tree’s death, micro-organisms and insects break it down into pure nutrients and organic material that create a fertile and inviting home for new life. The tree’s nutrients are thus returned to the soil and used by future plant generations.

Forest News

Credit: Ryan Hodnett

• India’s Response to the Paris Agreement: Plant 66 Million Trees in Just 12 Hours – Forbes
  Talk about cooperation. Last Sunday in India, 1.5 million people gathered to plant an astonishing 66 million trees in only 12 hours, breaking their own Guinness World Record from last year. To put this feat in perspective, that’s the equivalent of the entire population of Philadelphia working toward a common goal of reforestation.
• In Austin, the air smells of tacos and trees – and city-state conflict – The Washington Post
  Citizens of Austin are trying out a new conservation tactic: naming their trees in an effort to save them from being bulldozed due to new development. All protected under a city ordinance, I’m sure Patsy Cline, Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson are more than grateful for their human advocates.
• Bridgeland builds its own community tree house – The Houston Chronicle
  In Bridgeland, Texas, a new community tree house has been added to the city’s growing list of public amenities. Peter Houghton, vice president of master planned communities of Bridgeland Development, says, “The Tree House is a great example of the Bridgeland vision to provide our residents with unique or unusual amenities that add character and identity to the community.”
• Youth Brigade Aims to Close Tree Canopy Gap in East Boston– WBUR.org
  When a group of ten high school students discovered that East Boston sidewalks have “just 15 percent of the ideal number of trees,” they knew something had to be done. Their goal is to double that percentage, and they plan to plant 2,000 new trees in response to extreme heat and pollution.
• In the egg, American bullfrogs learn how to avoid becoming lunch – ScienceDaily
  It turns out American bullfrogs are strengthening their defenses before even leaving the egg. According to a new study by researchers at Oregon State University, “These embryos can learn about new predators while they are still in the egg, and they behave and develop differently after they hatch based on that learning.”

By Melanie Friedel, American Forests

I grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia, and for some reason, I always felt like the day got hotter as soon as I entered the city. And it wasn’t all in my imagination! There is a phenomenon called the urban heat island effect that causes urban areas to be a few degrees warmer than the surrounding rural or suburban areas, creating an “island” of concentrated heat. This happens year round, day and night. The average annual air temperature of a city with a population of 1 million or more people can be 1.8–5.4°F warmer than its surroundings. At night, this difference can be as large as 22°F warmer in cities.

That’s a pretty big disparity. So, how does it happen? First, we need to understand that objects and surfaces absorb and reflect light: darker surfaces absorb more light and lighter surfaces absorb significantly less, as they reflect a larger percentage of it. When a surface absorbs light, that light turns into thermal energy and is sent back out into the environment as heat. Thus, the more light a surface absorbs, the more heat it emits.

A temperature profile of an urban setting — notice the disparity between the pavement and the plants.

When cities are built, vegetation and green spaces are replaced by asphalt and buildings that make cities full of black surfaces like rooftops, paved streets and parking lots. These dark surfaces consequently absorb light and emit lots of heat into the city. In the most extreme urban settings, the heat gets trapped in the city by what we call the “canyon effect.” City buildings are tall and close together, and the streets are narrow, causing the heat to be held within and between buildings. The small amount of heat that is able to escape upwards ends up getting trapped between the walls of tall skyscrapers.

Many cities are like deserts: they have minimal vegetation, and their surfaces are largely impermeable to rain. This combination prevents evapotranspiration (which is essentially leaves sweating out moisture), which normally reduces temperatures by increasing the water content of the surrounding air. Not to mention, lots of heat from all the activity of people, cars, buses, trains and the burning of fossil fuels creates waste heat: heat that is emitted when people or machines use up energy. Many cities are full of waste heat before the heat island effect even begins. (Ever wonder why a crowded room feels so much hotter than one with only a few people?)

So, cities will be a few degrees warmer; doesn’t seem like such a big deal, right? Wrong. Urban heat islands do much more than just create an unpleasantly hot environment. They increase energy consumption and air conditioning costs. They also worsen air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, water quality, heat-related illnesses and mortality.

How do they do this? Urban environments are already full of pollution from vehicles and industry. But with dark surfaces and city buildings creating and trapping heat, pollutants become even more concentrated. Buildings also act as obstacles that prevent wind flow and thereby slow the process of pollution dispersion. City ground levels often experience smog (a hazy, pollutant-packed combination of smoke and fog that lingers over cities). This creates a small scale greenhouse effect by trapping greenhouse gases from the city’s fossil fuel emissions (transportation, energy use and industry) and holding heat down at ground level and inside the city. All of these pollutants are a risk to human health, especially respiratory and cardiovascular systems, and these effects are only made worse when concentrated in a hot urban island.

When it comes to water quality, increased temperatures warm the local streams and other water bodies, disrupting the environments of and often killing native aquatic species that are used to cooler water temperatures. This disrupts the rest of the ecosystem that relies on that water.

Credit: Brett Weinstein

The process is cyclical. As the city gets hotter, the demand for air conditioning gets higher, and more energy is used, creating more heat and more pollution emissions, and higher and higher temperatures.

Thankfully, there are ways we can slow down the cycle and attempt to break it.

Painting white or light colored structure in cities will help reflect light instead of absorbing it. Planting trees and vegetation, especially green roofs and trees that cover dark pavement and trap pollutants, will help lower the concentration of CO2 in the air and cool the city. And, of course, it’s always smart to use energy efficient appliances to reduce our emissions of both pollutants and heat.

It is important that city governments work to prevent and reverse heat islands by taking these steps, but communities and individuals play a powerful role too and should implement cleaner, greener, and cooler strategies into their lives. Even with the heat island effect, cities are cool places to be. Let’s try to keep them that way.

By Allie Wisniewski, American Forests

When you hear of the PNW, maybe you think of endless rain, the Space Needle, or Starbucks. Maybe you think of cycling, hipsters or Portlandia. The Pacific Northwest is much more than all of those things, however. With mountains, temperate rainforests, natural hot springs, waterfalls — you name it — this iconic region of the U.S. is a nature lover’s paradise. Let’s take a look at some of its most enchanting wilderness areas and revel in the magic of the PNW.

By Doyle Irvin, American Forests

Credit: Scott Robinson

Andy Goldsworthy. Credit to the artist, photo from visualmelt.com

The artists who really intrigue me are those who can make me rethink everyday life. They take a normally overlooked aspect and create something beautiful out of it, forcing me to pause and reconsider everything I wouldn’t usually notice. So that’s what I am bringing to you today: artists who question our place in the world.

Perhaps the easiest example is Andy Goldsworthy, OBE. The British sculptor and environmentalist uses all-natural found materials and sculpts them into geometric shapes, employing stunning use of color and linear perspective.

It’s hard to always stop and smell the roses. What’s so special about fallen leaves? There are millions of them. Yet Goldsworthy’s work brings out the inherent beauty in the world around us, and make us notice.

If you want to see more of his work, you can find it here and this archive of his work, created by his partner, Dr. Tina Fiske.

Why is his work so powerful? Scientist Richard Taylor began looking into the effects of art on the human psyche, and found pretty interesting links between nature and art. “Although aesthetics is often regarded as an ill-defined vague quality, research groups like mine are using sophisticated techniques to quantify it – and its impact on the observer,” he writes. “We’re finding that aesthetic images can induce staggering changes to the body, including radical reductions in the observer’s stress levels.”

An example of Axel Erlandson’s tree weaving. Credit: Jay Peeples

He uses a tree as an example – trunk, branches, twigs; all are fractal delineations, following a pattern that gets repeated over and over. When it comes to humans, they discovered what they call “fractal fluency,” which is two-fold: the first aspect is that we evolved in nature, and were thus exposed to (and comfortable in) surroundings that are inundated with fractals; the second aspect is that artists intuit this comfort and recreate it in their work.

Another example of an artist using nature (and fractals) to create something special is Axel Erlandson. He used living trees and shaped them into patterns that make it easy to raise the question – what is our life? How do we shape it? How are we ourselves shaped?

You can find more tree-shapers here.

Some tree-artists are a little more upfront with their messages, however. Denver-based environmentalist and artist Konstantin Dimopoulos painted more than 100 trees in downtown Denver bright blue, using biologically safe paints. He states that the project is meant to draw attention to climate change. “I want people to notice the trees,” Dimopoulos says, “to see them as more than just wallpaper in their lives. Change can be threatening. Changing a local environment through color is both disconcerting and even uncomfortable.”

You can learn more about the project in 303 Magazine.

You don’t have to be alone to appreciate nature! The Red Earth Project is a collective of artists that we think are particularly cool. They come together to stage site-specific installations and performance pieces that respond to landscapes all across the world. They bring together not just artists but also archaeologists, farmers, historians, local communities and more, in order to delve into the heritage of the Earth and those who walk upon it. Pictured here is their project, Outcrop, which is “A series of 30ft high sculptures on the South Downs Way, constructed from green wood and stitched wheat … the forms were inspired by visible stages of vegetation growth; the photosynthetic urge upward countered by the increasing weight of the fruit it bears, pulling the structure back towards the earth.”

How cool is that? These are the projects that bring me away from the screen, away from LCD’s flickering thousands of times a second, away from subway armpits and muffler grease, away from the treadmill and the elliptical and their faux-motion. May they ever continue.

By Allie Wisniewski, American Forests

On Thursday, June 15, the American Forests Board of Directors gathered in the Cannon House Office Building on Capitol Hill, ready to engage in panel discussions with policy experts from our partner conservation organizations.

The panel discussion brought together leaders of key conservation issues that are important to American Forests, each with their own knowledge and perspectives to share. Among them were:

• Mary Elizabeth Beetham, Director of Legislative Affairs at Defenders of Wildlife
• Kristen Brengel, Vice President of Government Affairs at National Parks Conservation Association
• Cecilia Clavet, Senior Policy Advisor at The Nature Conservancy
• Rita Hite, Executive Vice President of Woodlands and Policy at American Forest Foundation

With years of expertise under their belts, these influential women in conservation shared with our board members crucial information regarding environmental affairs in our new political climate.

Mary Beth discussed current threats to the Endangered Species Act and emphasized the urgency of its protection, considering that one in three endangered species depend on forests for their survival.

Kristen explained the Antiquities Act, which was designed to protect national monuments and public lands from development and natural resource extraction. Twenty-seven monuments included in the Act are now under “review”, and reclassification could possibly have long-term detrimental impacts on conservation efforts.

Cecilia discussed existing plans for a new Wildfire Disaster Funding Act, which provides a more comprehensive wildfire funding solution for the US Forest Service.

Finally, Rita, an expert on the U.S. Farm Bill, or the Agriculture Adjustment Act, let us know that potential support for forest conservation is growing.

Moderated by our very own Rebecca Turner, senior director of programs and policy and our new vice president of conservation programs, Jad Daley, our most recent board meeting was more than a success. Our board members were actively engaged and discussed extensively how American Forests’ programs and policy priorities are interconnected.

When information and collaboration combine with the hard-working and dedicated conservationists we are thankful to have as part of our team, great things happen! It’s safe to say we are on our way to a brighter and greener future.