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Forests in Brazil emitting more carbon than they absorb due to climate change: Study

Julia Jacobo
Christian Ender/Getty Images, FILE
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Tropical forests in Brazil have begun to release more carbon than they absorb as the warming climate kills more of the trees, researchers said. The forests play an important role in the climate fight for their ability to absorb carbon dioxide from Earth’s atmosphere, but dry and warm seasonal forests in southeastern Brazil have been progressively absorbing less carbon while releasing more over time, with the region transitioning “from a carbon sink to a carbon source” in 2013, according to a study published Friday in Science.
Read More at BBC News

The Social Life of Forests

Ferris Jabr
Brendan George Ko
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Although plants are obviously alive, they are rooted to the earth and mute, and they rarely move on a relatable time scale; they seem more like passive aspects of the environment than agents within it. Western culture, in particular, often consigns plants to a liminal space between object and organism. It is precisely this ambiguity that makes the possibility of plant intelligence and society so intriguing — and so contentious.
Read More at The New York Times Magazine

Virtual reality forests could help understanding of climate change

Jiawei Huang, Melissa S. Lucash, Robert M. Scheller, Alexander Klippel.
iStock
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The effects of climate change are sometimes difficult to grasp, but now a virtual reality forest, created by geographers, can let people walk through a simulated forest of today and see what various futures may hold for the trees.
Read More at Science Daily / Penn State

A coalition of nine financial institutions representing €1.8 trillion in assets under management is asking companies to take action to end deforestation in their supply chains, as well as to enhance supply chain traceability.

Rachel Cooper
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A coalition of nine financial institutions representing €1.8 trillion in assets under management is asking companies to take action to end deforestation in their supply chains, as well as to enhance supply chain traceability.
Read More at ClimateAction

Never Underestimate the Intelligence of Trees

Brandon Keim
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For the past two decades, Suzanne Simard, a professor in the Department of Forest & Conservation at the University of British Columbia, has studied mycorrhizae: the symbiotic unions of fungi and root long known to help plants absorb nutrients from soil. Beginning with landmark experiments describing how carbon flowed between paper birch and Douglas fir trees, Simard found that mycorrhizae didn’t just connect trees to the earth, but to each other as well. Simard went on to show how mycorrhizae-linked trees form networks, with individuals she dubbed Mother Trees at the center of communities that are in turn linked to one another, exchanging nutrients and water in a literally pulsing web that includes not only trees but all of a forest’s life. These insights had profound implications for our understanding of forest ecology—but that was just the start.
Read More at Nautilus

NASA Supercomputing Study Breaks Ground for Tree Mapping, Carbon Research

Jessica Merzdorf
NASA
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Using powerful supercomputers and machine learning algorithms, scientists from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and international collaborators are demonstrating a new method for mapping the location and size of trees growing outside of forests. In the process, they have discovered billions of trees in arid and semi-arid regions and are laying the groundwork for more accurate global measurement of carbon storage on land.
Read More at NASA
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