Category: Forests

Is the Amazon near a tipping point? Three real-world studies are ominous

10/24/2021

Near the Freire home, there was a stream so wide that the children – aged between 5 and 12 when they arrived – would dare each other to reach the other side. They called it Jaguar's Creek. Now it's not a meter wide and can be cleared with a single step. The loss of such streams, and the wider water problems they are a part of, fill scientists with foreboding.Covering an area roughly the size of the contiguous United States and accounting for more than half of the world's rainforest, the Amazon exerts power over the carbon cycle like no other terrestrial ecosystem on Earth. The tree loss from an extremely dry year in 2005, for example, released an additional quantity of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere equivalent to the annual emissions of Europe and Japan combined, according to a 2009 study published in Science magazine. - Reuters

Trees Talk To Each Other. 'Mother Tree' Ecologist Hears Lessons For People, Too

8/13/2021

Trees are "social creatures" that communicate with each other in cooperative ways that hold lessons for humans, too, ecologist Suzanne Simard says. Trees are linked to neighboring trees by an underground network of fungi that resembles the neural networks in the brain, she explains. In one study, Simard watched as a Douglas fir that had been injured by insects appeared to send chemical warning signals to a ponderosa pine growing nearby. The pine tree then produced defense enzymes to protect against the insect. "This was a breakthrough," Simard says. The trees were sharing "information that actually is important to the health of the whole forest." - NPR

Is the Amazon near a tipping point? Three real-world studies are ominous

Trees Talk To Each Other. 'Mother Tree' Ecologist Hears Lessons For People, Too

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