It's Friday: Here's Your Week in Trees
June 1, 2012 at 2:45 pm by Amanda Cooke
This week's edition features news about air pollution, tree banding, creativity's connection to nature, the power of partnerships, and biobased products. Here's your tree news from around the world:
- Have you ever seen a a tree-pruning helium balloon floating in an English biodome? No? Well, get on it! [The Big Picture]
- India's forests and wetlands are in jeopardy. Here’s what one award-winning naturalist thinks his country must do to save them [Tehelka]
- Talk about a trailblazer: Jan Mendoza was one of the first-ever female firefighters for CAL FIRE, spending a summer battling wildland blazes in a nearly all-male environment [Appeal-Democrat]
- Sequoia National Park is home to giant Sequoia redwoods, some of the biggest and among the oldest living things on earth. Sadly, the Sierra Nevada forest also has the highest air pollution levels of any national park in the country [Orange County Register]
- For the past 18 months, a team of 10 volunteers and researchers has been trekking through Indonesia's Bukit Kalang forest, armed with plastic strips, springs and crimping tools to band trees. Learn why [The Jakarta Post]
- A 130-acre nature center is teaching university students to spot the good, the bad, and the ugly elements of Michigan's 19.3 million acres of forestland [The Republic]
- San Francisco's "yearly eco-benefit" from its 86,815 mapped trees is $3,446,292 [InsideClimate News]
- Oh no! Another image of a tranquilized bear falling from a tree surfaced in Colorado [NBC News]
- Many fire-starved forests of the eastern United States are undergoing a rapid shift in character. Swathes of oak, hickory and pine—forests that rebounded even after the widespread clear-cutting of the 19th century—are falling to species like maple and beech that fire once kept in check [Paul Voosen's Twitter feed]
- Kenya's forests are also changing dramatically. The country's government has partnered with NGOs to restore the Mau Forest with millions of native trees that are more adaptable to the increasingly harsh climate [allAfrica]
- "Without these trees, I would not have been able to recover from the hefty financial losses and grow cotton again on my farm so soon,” Pakistani farmer Abdul Qadir Shah said after the country's devastating floods. The farmer planted mango, date, and neem trees on his land which provided him with crucial interim income after his crops were destroyed [AlertNet]
- Looking to hit a home run with your next work project? Get outside. Backpackers tested while hiking outdoors showed signs of 50 percent more creativity during a recent study [Mother Nature Network]
- Sixteen-year-old Vienna Vitek uses art to draw people close to her cause to help conserve Costa Rica's rainforests [Denver's 7NEWS]
- The 2012 Arbor Day Award for Education Innovation went to World Vision Australia, which has helped people in some of the poorest parts of the world fight hunger and environmental degradation by planting and caring for trees [Arbor Day Foundation's Facebook page]
- Working together works: Investors and private landowners in the Dominican Republic's rugged northeast have partnered to prevent forest fragmentation and protect the habitat of the Bicknell's thrush [Bloomberg Businessweek]
- Learn more about identification and nesting habits of the vulnerable Bicknell's thrush [The Cornell Lab of Ornithology]
- "Without the forests, we’d starve...The forests feed the springs and rivers that irrigate fields, give potable water and help supply the villagers’ protein needs in the form of fresh water fish and wild game like wild pigs and deer," Tinguian elder Magno Dumas said this week. The Tinguian are an indigenous people from a forested mountain province in the Philippines [Inquirer Northern Luzon]
- In an effort to help restore markets for forest products and alleviate some of the financial burden faced by America’s family forest owners, Congressmen Glenn Thompson and Kurt Schrader introduced the Forest Products Fairness Act of 2012 [AFF Newsroom]
Photo taken at the 2012 PLT International Coordinators' Conference by Dianne Miller. Check out more tree hugger pictures on the PLT Facebook page!
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