#Forests

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Rikugien Gardens (六義園) Bunkyō, Tokyo, Japan

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breathe this air

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One thing that I've noticed while hiking in different environments is that regions that were heavily deforested over 100s of years become rife with invasive species. Cutting down the tree canopy allows fast-growing invasive plants and trees to take over entire areas, preventing light from reaching slower growing native trees and shrubs. Old growth forests that grow in remote areas that couldn't be deforested due to mountainous terrain have more native species. I've hiked in sections of the Italian Alps or Northern Appalachian mountains in Maine and you see mostly native plants in these higher altitude regions. Contrast that with the farmlands surrounding Veneto in Italy, or the Netherlands or Germany, or deforested and reforested former farmlands in Connecticut and Maine, for example, up to 80% of the plant species are non-native, invasive species like Japanese Knotweed, Garlic Mustard, Mugwort, Tree of heaven, Privet, Winged Euonymus, Porcelain berry, Kudzu, Rosa multiflora, and so many more.

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"A century of gradual reforestation across the American East and Southeast has kept the region cooler than it otherwise would have become, a new study shows.

The pioneering study of progress shows how the last 25 years of accelerated reforestation around the world might significantly pay off in the second half of the 21st century.

Using a variety of calculative methods and estimations based on satellite and temperature data from weather stations, the authors determined that forests in the eastern United States cool the land surface by 1.8 – 3.6°F annually compared to nearby grasslands and croplands, with the strongest effect seen in summer, when cooling amounts to 3.6 – 9°F.

The younger the forest, the more this cooling effect was detected, with forest trees between 20 and 40 years old offering the coolest temperatures underneath.

“The reforestation has been remarkable and we have shown this has translated into the surrounding air temperature,” Mallory Barnes, an environmental scientist at Indiana University who led the research, told The Guardian.

“Moving forward, we need to think about tree planting not just as a way to absorb carbon dioxide but also the cooling effects in adapting for climate change, to help cities be resilient against these very hot temperatures.”

The cooling of the land surface affected the air near ground level as well, with a stepwise reduction in heat linked to reductions in near-surface air temps.

“Analyses of historical land cover and air temperature trends showed that the cooling benefits of reforestation extend across the landscape,” the authors write. “Locations surrounded by reforestation were up to 1.8°F cooler than neighboring locations that did not undergo land cover change, and areas dominated by regrowing forests were associated with cooling temperature trends in much of the Eastern United States.”

By the 1930s, forest cover loss in the eastern states like the Carolinas and Mississippi had stopped, as the descendants of European settlers moved in greater and greater numbers into cities and marginal agricultural land was abandoned.

The Civilian Conservation Corps undertook large replanting efforts of forests that had been cleared, and this is believed to be what is causing the lower average temperatures observed in the study data.

However, the authors note that other causes, like more sophisticated crop irrigation and increases in airborne pollutants that block incoming sunlight, may have also contributed to the lowering of temperatures over time. They also note that tree planting might not always produce this effect, such as in the boreal zone where increases in trees are linked with increases in humidity that way raise average temperatures."

-via Good News Network, February 20, 2024

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Bones☺️

Bones

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Not much Fall color yet, but the park was still pretty

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Wild garlic season

Etsy shop

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Old growth on the Olympic Peninsula

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Bilder zum Anschauungs-Unterricht für die Jugend - 1839 - via Staatsbibliothek Berlin

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CA Redwoods to Be First National Park Co-Managed with a Native American Tribe That Used to Own it https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/ca-redwoods-to-be-the-first-national-park-co-managed-with-a-native-american-tribe-that-used-to-own-it/

questionable headline aside this is good news

The Yurok will be the first Tribal nation to co-manage land with the National Park Service under a historic memorandum of understanding signed on Tuesday by the tribe, Redwood national and state parks, and the non-profit Save the Redwoods League, according to news reports.

The Yurok tribe has seen a wave of successes in recent years, successfully campaigning for the removal of a series of dams on the Klamath River, where salmon once ran up to their territory, and with the signing of a new memorandum of understanding, the Yurok are set to reclaim more of what was theirs.

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September 22nd, 2024

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