Science News had an interesting article this week. It was about a new study which showed that the biggest amount of tree damage in Hurricane Maria back in 2017 was not where the strongest winds were but where the rains were heaviest. Hurricane Irma, which passed near PR two weeks…
Read More
In the Southeast, changes in land use from bare ground croplands to forests are thought to be one of the contributing factors to the cooling that Georgia and other Southeastern states saw in the period from roughly the 1940’s to the 1970’s. Now a similar land use change in western…
Read More
Southerly Magazine has an interesting story about the longleaf pine’s history in the Southeast. It was nearly eliminated by logging and development and then replaced by other species. But it has a long history of surviving in the region for thousands of year before humans lived here…
Read More
If you have ever been to Miami, you might agree that it is hard to find anything that looks like a native ecosystem. So I was very interested to read this article in Atlas Obscura describing the small remnants of pine rocklands, an endangered native forest that is located in…
Read More
One method for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere that is often mentioned is the planting of millions of trees, which help soak up CO2 as they grow, trapping it in the tree instead of allowing it to remain in the atmosphere. While planting of trees has many benefits to…
Read More
You know from previous blog posts that tree rings contain a lot of climate information encoded in the thickness of each annual ring, including information about temperature and precipitation as well as some occasional information about fires, floods and other impactful events. But you might not know that tree rings…
Read More
You’ve probably read here or elsewhere about the terrible fires that have been sweeping through parts of Australia recently. The fires have reported killed over one billion animals such as kangaroos and koalas, and I have read awful stories about farmers having to kill their cattle severely injured by the…
Read More