Interior Alaskan forests have only six native tree species: white spruce, black spruce, quaking aspen, balsam poplar, larch (tamarack) and paper birch. Northern Canadian forests have all of those, plus jack pine, balsam fir and lodgepole pine. Since northern Canada and interior Alaska share the same grueling climate and extremes of daylength, why are the Canadian tree species absent from ...
Stan Boutin has climbed more than 5,000 spruce trees in the last 30 years. He has often returned to the forest floor knowing if a ball of twigs and moss within the tree contained newborn red squirrel pups. Over the years, those squirrels have taught Boutin and his colleagues many things, including an apparent ability to predict the future. Boutin, of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, was ...
Knowing that, forest managers might be able to anticipate an outbreak and plan tree harvests ahead of the beetles or try preventative measures that might work on small outbreaks, such as tree thinning, pruning, setting out hormone traps for beetles, and getting rid of piles of logs that attract beetles.
The evidence for this can be found in "trim lines" of old forestation and can be dated by examining the tree rings of the uppermost trees that survived injuries from earlier splashes. These trim lines show that similar, but smaller, waves occurred in Lituya Bay in 1853, 1874, and 1936. It is known that these were not all earthquake generated.
Botanists surveying a remote forest reserve on Pemba Island in Tanzania’s Zanzibar archipelago have discovered a forest of rare trees — the only place in Africa where they’re known to occur in the ...