View From The Canopy #32
Hello and welcome to issue #32 of View From The Canopy newsletter. World’s most famous tree scientist and veritable tree wisperer Suzanne Simard has published her first book; Finding The Mother Tree. Listen to the interview and read the review in this week’s newsletter.
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News articles 📰
Unearthing the Work of Indigenous Master Horticulturalists
These forest gardeners got sustainable returns for centuries. Dr. Chelsey Geralda Armstrong and her team at Simon Fraser University have made a crucial discovery about B.C.’s ancient forest ecosystems — one that could strengthen the systems of today and tomorrow and equip us to understand our own environment even as it changes with the climate.
[B.C.,CANADA]
Old-growth forest activists to appeal B.C. court injunction against blockades
A group of activists maintaining blockades aimed at preventing old-growth trees from being logged have filed a notice to appeal a British Columbia Supreme Court decision that granted an injunction against them.
[WORLD]
Global forest losses accelerated despite the pandemic, threatening world’s climate goals
The loss of forests critical to protecting wildlife and slowing climate change accelerated during 2020, despite a worldwide pandemic that otherwise led to a dramatic drop in greenhouse gas emissions, a global survey released Wednesday has found.
The Earth saw nearly 100,000 square miles of lost tree cover last year — an area roughly the size of Colorado — according to the satellite-based survey by Global Forest Watch. The change represents nearly 7% more trees lost than in 2019.
‘Living giants’: Conservationists urge government to protect oldest and largest trees
In an urgent letter to Environment Minister Lily D’Ambrosio, the National Trust of Australia (Victoria) and the Victorian National Parks Association have urged her to prevent any work in these three logging coupes to protect the trees, saying these “living giants are our shared heritage to care for and hand on to future generations”.
read at The Sydney Morning Herald
Resilient redwood forest a beacon of hope for California
Eight months after a lightning siege ignited more than 650 wildfires in Northern California, the state’s oldest park — which was almost entirely ablaze — is doing what nature does best: recovering.
Forest Fires Updates 🔥
[USA]
Drones drop pine seed, soil over forests ravaged by fire
Conservationists on the California-Nevada border are experimenting with a new way to try to revive forests devastated by wildfires: by using drones to rain balls of nutrients, soil and pine seeds over the ravaged landscapes
Opinion 💬
[CANADA]
Liberals tree-planting promise all talk so far
The Conservatives' environment critic says almost two years after promising to plant two billion trees within a decade, the Liberals have provided little in the way of detail on how that will actually get done.
Happy Arbor Day! And The Satellite Ping-Pong of Planting Trees
Tree planting has become controversial through what I call “Satellite Ping-Pong.” It’s an infinite game of discussing different assumptions about enormous and global questions by volleying between specific places and concerns. But the people directly involved in making decisions, including landowners and communities, are never involved in the game. Others claim to speak for them with varying degrees of accuracy.
Research & Reports 🔬
The Rain Forest Can Recover After Fire, but It’s Not the Same
New research finds that temperatures rise in the Amazon rain forest after a fire, even in areas that are not converted to agricultural land or pastures.
Pollen study shows forest regrowth began hundreds of years before arrival of Europeans in Amazonia
An international team of researchers has found evidence showing that forest regrowth in Amazonia began prior to the arrival of Europeans in South America. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes their analysis of fossilized pollen retrieved from lake beds in the region.
Species diversity in cloud forests dwindling – even in protected areas
The area of tropical montane cloud forests is shrinking worldwide. An international research team led by the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL has been able to prove this for the first time with the help of satellite data. The decline is associated with an immense loss of plants and animals. Protected areas have hardly any effect.
read at Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL
Featured Forest ✨
Wistman’s Wood, Dartmoor, England
Photo © Ian Dagnall / Alamy
This weeks featured forest is the Wistman’s Wood in Dartmoor, Devon England. You may have heard of England’s most famous fragment of temperate rainforest: Wistman’s Wood, in the middle of Dartmoor. With its gnarled and stunted oaks, its remote location marooned within a sheep-nibbled moorscape, and attendant tales of spectral hounds that inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, it has an outsize reputation for somewhere so tiny in size: eight acres – about four football pitches.
see also the linked story below from The Guardian
Miscellaneous 🍂
Life finds a way: in search of England’s lost, forgotten rainforests
Much of Britain’s temperate rainforest has been destroyed – but it can sometimes regenerate. The race is on to map what survives and restore what we can. Few people realise that England has fragments of a globally rare habitat: temperate rainforest. I didn’t really believe it until I moved to Devon last year and started visiting some of these incredible habitats.
We’ve shown you Sweden in snow. Now see it in bloom.
A forest of one’s own: why even Virginia Woolf was felled by trees
Forest (Theatre of Trees), 2018-19, is a sculptural installation by Janet Laurence, part of her retrospective at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art in 2019. As curator Rachel Kent notes, “Trees have been a fixture of Laurence’s art since the beginning of her career”. Existing in a visual spectrum between art, science, imagination and memory, Laurence’s Forest is a kind of organic architecture that reveals and explores our relationship with nature.
read at The Sydney Morning Herald
Selected Book 📚
Finding the Mother Tree
by Suzanne Simard
Suzanne Simard revolutionised the way we think about plants and fungi with the discovery of the woodwide web. The ecologist’s new book shares the wisdom of a life of listening to the forest.
When Suzanne Simard made her extraordinary discovery – that trees could communicate and cooperate through subterranean networks of fungi – the scientific establishment underreacted. Even though her doctoral research was published in the Nature journal in 1997 – a coup for any scientist – the finding that trees are more altruistic than competitive was dismissed by many as if it were the delusion of an anthropomorphising hippy.
Today, at 60, she is professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia and her research of more than three decades as a “forest detective” is recognised worldwide. In her new book, Finding the Mother Tree – a scientific memoir as gripping as any HBO drama series – she wants it understood that her work has been no brief encounter: “I want people to know that what I’ve discovered has been about my whole life.” Her moment has come: research into forest ecosystems and mycorrhizal networks (those built of connections between plants and fungi) is now mainstream and there is a hunger for books related to the subject.
Until next week ✌️
I hope you enjoyed the view from the canopy. If you've come across any interesting articles or you've written something yourself please hit reply and let me know about them.
See you next week!
Cheers,
Johan
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