View From The Canopy #42
Hello and welcome to issue #42 of View From The Canopy. Enjoy another issue full of forest news plus some extras such as forest documentaries and photo essays.
The Canopy is going on a hiatus and will be posting less frequently for a while. A new job is going to keep me busy and I might not find enough time to keep writing these newsletters weekly.
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News articles 📰
[CANADA]
Under siege, B.C.'s forests have started emitting CO2. Lots of it
B.C.'s forest has been struggling under a relentlessly rising assault by the four horsemen of forest apocalypse: drought, heat, insects, and wildfire. Now, with its trees increasingly under siege and aflame, the forest has begun dying faster than it is growing back. Its once vast carbon sink has been replaced by a rising flood of CO2 pouring out of it and into our already destabilized climate system.
[CANADA]
Complicating the Fairy Creek narrative
There’s been no shortage of Fairy Creek coverage. But there is far more to this story than an intense stand-off over the future of old-growth forests
[UGANDA]
Uganda helps farmers grow trees for money in bid to reverse forest loss
After decades of losing thousands of hectares each year, Uganda has found a way not only to slow deforestation but to reverse it - mainly by helping people grow their own trees to cut down instead of clearing ecologically valuable rainforest.
[ARGENTINA]
The other Amazon: Soybeans drive loss of S. America's second-largest forest
It’s a familiar story: A vast forest in South America loses huge swathes of trees each year, threatening the communities living there, destroying rare habitats and exacerbating the effects of climate change on the region.
But this woodland is not Brazil’s Amazon - it is the Gran Chaco, the continent’s second-largest forest, where environmentalists say massive tree loss is being overlooked as the world focuses on the more famous “lungs of the planet”.
[HONG KONG]
Forests expand in Hong Kong, but they lack diversity
Hong Kong’s forests have been repeatedly cleared, but each time they grow back; however, they lack the species diversity needed to nurture native wildlife. An experiment by Kadoorie Farm and Botanic Garden aims to change that by seeing what steps are required for a wider range of trees and forest plants to grow
read at South China Morning Post
Forest Fires Updates 🔥
Here are two maps for tracking active forest fires:
ArcGIS US Wildfire Activity Map
Featured Forest ✨
Appalachian temperate rainforest, United States
Photo © Trigg Bowlin
This week’s featured forest is the Appalachian temperate rainforest in the United States. This rainforest is located in the southern Appalachian Mountains of the eastern U.S. About 351,500 square kilometers of forest land is spread across southwestern Virginia, western North Carolina, the tip of South Carolina, northern Georgia, and eastern Tennessee. The annual precipitation is more than 1500mm.
Red spruce and Fraser fir are dominant canopy trees in high mountain areas. In higher elevation, Fraser fir is dominant, in middle elevation red spruce and Fraser fir grow together, and in lower elevationred spruce is dominant. Yellow birch, mountain ash, and mountain maple grow in the understory. Younger spruce and fir and shrubs like raspberry, blackberry, hobblebush, southern mountain cranberries, red elderberry, minniebush, southern bush honeysuckle are understory vegetation. Below the spruce-fir forest, at around 1,200 metres, are forests of American beech, yellow birch, maple, birch, and oak.
Miscellaneous 🍂
Enchanted forests: British woods and moors at night – in pictures
The woods are lovely, dark and deep – at least in the images of Jasper Goodall. In Twilight’s Path, he stays awake to capture nocturnal landscapes in the forests and on the moors of the British Isles
Eleven Ways of Smelling a Tree
David Haskell invites us into the unique and sometimes surprising aromas of eleven different species of trees.
Treeline (Full Film) | The Secret Life of Trees
Patagonia Films presents Treeline: A Story Written in Rings, available in full for the first time. Follow a group of skiers, snowboarders, scientists and healers to the birch forests of Japan, the red cedars of British Columbia and the bristlecones of Nevada, as they explore an ancient story written in rings.
New England's Roadside Ecology with Tom Wessels
Tom leads us on one of the book's intriguing hikes, in the Kilburn Pond area of New Hampshire's Pisgah State Park, discussing a number of ecological features. There's much to be learned and seen here, including some old-growth forest, spiral tree growth, effects of the 1938 hurricane, and an unusual mystery surprise in the woods.
See also this week’s Selected Book
Forest: A Poem In Four Stanzas
Selected Book 📚
New England's Roadside Ecology
by Tom Wessels
New England’s Roadside Ecology guides you through 30 spectacular natural sites, all within an easy walk from the road. The sites include the forests, wetlands, alpines, dunes, and geologic ecosystems that make up New England.
Author Tom Wessels is the perfect guide. Each entry starts with the brief description of the hike's level of difficulty—all are gentle to moderate and cover no more than two miles. Entries also include turn-by-turn directions and clear descriptions of the flora, fauna, and fungi you are likely to encounter along the way. New England’s Roadside Ecology is a must-have guide for outdoor enthusiasts, hikers, and tourists in Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont.
Until next time ✌️
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 time!
Cheers,
Johan
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