It's Friday: Here's Your Week in Trees
Here's your tree news from around the world this week:
- This modified record player reads tree rings as if they were musical notes. Whoa. (io9)
- Fruit-eating animals play an important role in the lifecycle of tropical forests; the seeds of 75 to 95 percent of tropical tree species are dispersed by such animals (Jakarta Globe)
- Laurel wilt is a disease caused by the female ambrosia beetle which is boring through the bark of South Carolina's redbay trees with a fungus on its mouthparts. Shudder. (The Times and Democrat)
- Michael Fay's 15-month survey of Africa's dense tropical forests helped spur the creation of 13 new national parks in Gabon, placing four million hectares into protected status (Voice of America)
- The world's ecological 'kings of the jungle'--i.e. giant trees--are being toppled by forest fragmentation, severe drought, and new pests and diseases (The Guardian)
- Oregon's landowners have been enlisted to help identify hazards left in the wake of this month's series of storms (Salem-News.com)
- To all you caterpillars out there: It's better to feed on a poor-quality tree species and have fewer caterpillars around you than to be on a nutritious plant with many others (Science Daily)
- Scientists have recorded the Amazon rainforest's structure and biodiversity in incredible depth by bouncing laser beams off the canopy 400,000 times per second (The Guardian)
Redbay photo credit Flickr's tedreese