Planet in Peril (PinP) where science gets respect!

YaleEnvironment360 Riding Mtn. National Park, Manitoba, Canada. A PinP photo. Nations around the world are pledging to plant billions of trees to grow new forests. But a new study shows that the potential for natural forest regrowth to absorb carbon from the atmosphere and fight climate change is far greater than has previously been estimated. Story here.

PHYS ORG Rainforest foliage in Nightcap National Park, NSW Wales, an international heritage site hit hard by the bushfires. Photo by Naught101 Recent wildfires in Australia torched more than 48,000 square miles of land (for context, more than 40 Riding Mountain National Parks). The fires impacted ecologically sensitive regions, including an area called the Gondwana Rainforests of Australia World Heritage Site. This region contains a vast concentration of living plants with fossil records from tens of millions of years ago, according to Peter Wilf. Story here. RELATED: The hand of man shows through once again in another climate catastrophe.

Science News -  Wildlife Conservation Society A tropical forest in Guatemala. Photo by Chixoy. A new study says that carbon impacts from the loss of intact tropical forests has been grossly underreported. Story here.

YaleEnvironment360 Amazon fires, August 2019, some deliberately set to make way for agriculture. Satellite image taken by MODIS. At a remote site where the world’s largest rainforest abuts land cleared for big agriculture, Brazilian and American scientists are keeping watch for a critical tipping point – the time when the Amazon ceases to be a carbon sink and turns into a source of carbon emissions. Story here.

It's no secret that the now-infamous bug-killer, DDT , persists stubbornly in the environment. Still, what scientists found in lake sediments they recently analyzed in the Atlantic province, 50 years after it was last used there, shocked them. The sediment in all five lakes they tested (representing numerous watersheds), were laced with DDT at levels up to 450 times beyond what would be considered safe for key aquatic species and even entire food webs. by Larry Powell In some ways, it was like a real war. A plane sprays DDT on bud worms in Oregon, 1955.  Photo by Forest Health Protection. In the early fifties, governments and the forest industry teamed up in New Brunswick to launch a massive aerial assault against spruce bud worms.  The pests had probably been eating their way through conifer stands in eastern Canada and the U.S. for thousands of years. But now, they were causing hundreds of millions of dollars of damage yearly to forests of mostly spru

Science News A  forest in Maritime Canada. A PinP photo. With age, forests in eastern US and Canada become less vulnerable to climate change, study finds.  Story here .

Science Daily  In this image, intact forest is deep green, while cleared areas are tan (bare ground) or light green (crops, pasture, or occasionally, second-growth forest). The fish-bone pattern of small clearings along new roads is the beginning of one of the common deforestation trajectories in the Amazon.  A NASA photo. The clearing and subsequent instability of Amazonian forests are among the greatest threats to tropical biodiversity conservation today.  Story here.

Science The Amazon, near Manaus.  Photo by Neil Palmer (CIAT) . Brazil, home to one of the planet's last great forests, is currently in trade negotiations with its second largest trading partner, the European Union (EU). We urge the EU to seize this critical opportunity to ensure that Brazil protects human rights and the environment.  More here. --> Related:  Attacks on Brazil's ecological paradises.

WORLD RESOURCES INSTITUTE Manitoba's Riding Mtn. Park. The tropics lost 12 million hectares of tree cover in 2018, the fourth-highest annual loss since record-keeping began in 2001. Of greatest concern is the disappearance of 3.6 million hectares of primary rainforest, an area the size of Belgium (ten Riding Mountain Parks). The figures come from updated data from the University of Maryland, released today on Global Forest Watch. More here.

The Guardian Spared by the loggers’ chainsaws, a Douglas fir perhaps 1,000 years old stands in splendid isolation on Vancouver Island . Story here.

Yale Environment 360 Producing charcoal in the rainforest. By User Kelberul on de.wikipedia  A growing body of evidence indicates that the continuing destruction of tropical forests is disrupting the movement of water in the atmosphere, causing major shifts in precipitation that could lead to drought in key agricultural areas in China, India, and the U.S. Midwest. Story here.

The Guardian The deforestation it causes is decimating species such as orangutans and tigers - but the alternatives could be worse, finds authoritative report. More here.

NATIONAL  OBSERVER Environmentalists have accused the B.C. government of lying about the amount of majestic, centuries-old trees left standing in the province. Story here. An 800 year-old Douglas-fir near  Port Alberni,  BC Photo by  Gillian (EverySpoon)

The Guardian Logging in Australia. Photo by  Peter Campbell Tree-felling helped trigger ‘hidden collapse’ of mountain ash forests, ecologists say. More here.

The Province Part of the remaining stand of rainforest on Vancouver Island. Photo by Jason Holinger. For millennia, Vancouver Island was mostly covered by spectacular, globally rare ancient rainforest. Many trees were 1,000 years old or older. Indigenous peoples co-existed with the rainforest using many of its plants and animals without destroying it. Shortly after the arrival of Europeans, logging began in earnest. In less than 100 years, the majority of the ancient trees have been logged. Story here.

ScienceDaily Source:: Tropical Trees. Author: Paul Hamilton. Trees in the tropics, especially important for the planet, face increasing threats.    More here.

Nature Ecology & Evolution Riding Mountain National Park, Manitoba. PinP photo. As the terrestrial human footprint continues to expand, the amount of native forest that is free from significant damaging human activities is in precipitous decline. There is emerging evidence that the remaining intact forest supports an exceptional confluence of globally significant environmental values relative to degraded forests, including imperilled biodiversity, carbon sequestration and storage, water provision, indigenous culture and the maintenance of human health. Here we argue that maintaining and, where possible, restoring the integrity of dwindling intact forests is an urgent priority for current global efforts to halt the ongoing biodiversity crisis, slow rapid climate change and achieve sustainability goals. Retaining the integrity of intact forest ecosystems should be a central component of proactive global and national environmental strategies, alongside current efforts

YaleEnvironment360 A loophole in carbon-accounting rules is spurring a boom in burning wood pellets in European power plants. The result has been a surge in logging, particularly in the U.S. South, and new doubts about whether Europe can meet its commitments under the Paris accord.   Story here. PinP photo   PinP photo.

Nature Combination of satellite images and on-the-ground data enables more complete tracking of forest carbon flows. Story here. Peruvian rainforest. Roosevelt Garcia  at  English Wikipedia

EcoWatch An ancient Indonesian rainforest, home to elephants, orangutans, tigers and rhinos, is being destroyed by industries which extract products such as palm oil. Story here. A Sumatran tiger. Dick Mudde.