trees

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Calculating How Fast Trees and Forests Grow

That might sound like a rather dry, technological subject, but it is, obviously, quite important in relation to wood production from forests. It’s also important to be able to calculate tree growth rates so we can estimate how fast forests can absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it as carbon.
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Wood Ducks on a Wild River

Originally published by Village News, a publication of the community of Cabin John, MD. Wild, undammed rivers make dangerous neighbors. A signboard near the riverbank at one of the National Park entrances offers direct evidence of the Potomac's perils—57 drownings in ten years between Great Falls and Little Falls—about an 11-mile stretch.
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Wolves in a Tangled Bank

Elk browsing aspens in Yellowstone National Park. Photo by Cristina Eisenberg.
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A Call to Save Old Trees

David Lindenmayer and Jerry F. Franklin, authors of several Island Press titles, have just collaborated on an important new study. Published in the latest edition of Science, the study reveals that old trees worldwide are dying at an alarmingly fast rate —and that these deaths are impacting forests' ecosystems greatly.
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Ghost Trees

The standing dead trees were everywhere, their boles weathered silver where the bark had peeled. The carcasses of their fallen comrades littered the understory, with few aspen sprouting from the deadfall. The occasional mangled saplings we observed provided graphic evidence of heavy elk browsing.
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Aldo Leopold and the Mark of the Wolf's Tooth

In the early 1900s, while cruising timber as a young forester, American conservationist Aldo Leopold, founder of the science of wildlife biology, encountered a female wolf with her pups. The common wisdom of that era was that the only good predator was a dead one, so he and his crew opened fire. But as he stood there watching the “fierce green light” fade in the wolf mother’s eyes, he felt a sharp, surprising pang of remorse. It would take him decades to parse out his feelings about her death.

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