Recent Articles Related to Forest Restoration

The following are a few blurbs and links for articles related to forest restoration from the various RSS feeds I follow, including the one on this blogsite, (see “Environmental News Feeds” in the Menu below).

Forests and Trees

Increases in mortality among Douglas Firs in the Klamath Mountains are the result of multiple factors (here). Also for Douglas Firs, as climate warms, drier air is likely to be more stressful than less rainfall (here).

Trees prized for drought tolerance can lose that ability once they’re watered (here).

Dry days trigger the leaves of plants to send signals to their roots to keep growing (here).

The fire hazard in thinned forests can be lessened by creating “assembled nurse logs” (here).

Less-dense forests in California’s Sierra Nevada are more resilient to fire (here).

Carbon Sequestration

Greater diversity in forests increases the accumulation of carbon and nitrogen in their soil (here).

Microbes are by far the most important factor in determining how much carbon is stored in the soil (here).

Overall, fungi store about 13 gigatons of carbon in the earth’s soils. This is equivalent to over one-third of one-year’s global fossil fuel emissions (here).

Warmer soils retain less carbon, but forests help keep the soils beneath them cooler (here).

Biodiversity

Afforestation projects that include not only a variety of tree species, but also genetic diversity within each species, can increase their health and productivity (here). In practice, however, many restoration projects in the past have resulted in significantly lower genetic diversity among plants than that in “reference populations” (here).

The sheer number of simultaneously acting global change factors has a negative impact on the diversity of plant communities regardless of the nature of the individual factors (here).

Agriculture is driving rapid evolutionary resistance to herbicides, not just on farms, but also in plant species in surrounding landscapes (here).

The decline of insects has been well documented for agricultural areas, but similar declines have occurred in forests (here).

A recent study found that abandoned agricultural lands, through natural regeneration, had recovered about 75% of their “species richness” after 80 years (here).

Invasive Species

In King County, “English” Holly (Ilex aquifolium) is now “Common” Holly, part of an ongoing effort to use descriptive rather than nationalist names for plants (here).

Norway Maple is currently on the “monitor list” for the State and was added in 2023 as a weed of concern in King County (here).