It's Friday: Here's Your Week in Trees
May 25, 2012 at 10:15 am by Amanda Cooke
Here's your tree news from around the world this week. Enjoy your Memorial Day weekend!
- Two hundred and fifty feet up with only a rope to get down: Here's a look into U.S. Forest Service rappel training during the 2012 firefighting season [USDA blog]
- Speaking of heights, the world's second tallest structure has opened to the public. Could you imagine scaling Tokyo's Skytree? [The Atlantic Cities]
- Walk in the woods: Tasmania hosts one of Australia’s longest treetop walks. Check this bridge out! [The Epoch Times]
- Foresters in Wales call for urgent action to save the country's neglected woodlands [ITV News]
- Score one for newspapers! A series on forests earned a regional journalism award. The four-day series highlighted the changing ownership patterns of private forestland in the Western states [The Daily Astorian]
- Forty Malaysian students participated in a community-led forest rehabilitation program at the local Peat Swamp Forest Ranger Camp [New Straits Times]
- A fast-moving wildfire burned down seven homes in Nevada. Dry weather, strong winds have been preventing progress [Scientific American]
- A spruce budworm infestation could cost Canada's forest products industry more than $1 billion [CBC News]
- The Texas drought has had a devastating impact on the state's trees--an estimated 500 million trees have been killed. Here's what the disaster looks like from above [PBS]
- A new study finds that bark beetles can make trees release up to 20 times more of the organic substances that foster haze and air pollution in forested areas [ScienceDaily]
- Tigers grow up to nine feet long in these dense jungles near the India-Bangladesh border [The Atlantic]
- Researchers aim to assemble the "tree of life" for all two million named species on Earth. The tree which will bring together everything scientists know about how all living things are related [PhysOrg]
- Cryphonectria parasitica, the fungus that causes chestnut blight, has killed more than four billion chestnut trees. Here's what scientists are doing to fight the blight [YNN Rochester]
- A sweet story about loving trees: Residents of one California town banded together to preserve two olive trees originally planted by the town's founder in 1890 [Merced Sun-Star]
- Some Latvians are saying, "Move over, maple syrup, birch syrup may challenge your sweet rule" [NPR]
- Chinese forestry officials have started the first wide-randing census and DNA collection on endangered wild giant pandas [CRI English]
- Maine is under seige by heracleum mantegazzianum, or giant hogweed [Bangor Daily News]
Photo from the 2012 Project Learning Tree International Coordinators’ Conference, where leaders learned about Black Hills forest ecology at Sawyer Memorial Tree Farm. Credit: Al Stenstrup.
