forests | Environment.org

Below the red-tile roofs of the Catalina Foothills, an affluent area on the north end of Tucson, Arizona, lies a blanket of desert green: spiky cacti, sword-shaped yucca leaves, and the spindly limbs of palo verde and mesquite trees. Head south into the city, and the vegetation thins. Trees are especially scarce on the south side of town, where shops and schools and housing complexes sprawl across a land encrusted in concrete.

On hot summer days, you don’t just see but feel the difference. Tucson’s shadeless neighborhoods, which are predominantly low-income and Latino, soak up the heat. They swelter at summer temperatures that eclipse the city average by 8 degrees Fahrenheit and the Catalina Foothills by 12 degrees. That disparity can be deadly in a city that experienced 40 straight days above 100 degrees last year — heat that’s sure …

Impact of the 2015–2016 El Niño on the carbon dynamics of South American tropical forests

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| Climate

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 04 September 2023; doi:10.1038/s41558-023-01777-3

A network of more than 100 researchers tracked trees for up to 30 years in forest plots across South America, enabling estimation of the impacts of record temperatures and drought on carbon dynamics. The carbon sink in these forests ceased during the 2015–2016 El Niño, with drier forests losing the most carbon.
Nature Climate Change…

Forests managed by Indigenous nations face a $100 million funding gap

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| Pollution

Forests managed by Indigenous nations are severely underfunded. To reach per-acre parity with forests managed by the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service, the federal government would need to increase funding by nearly $ 96 million every year. That’s according to a new report from the Intertribal Timber Council, a nonprofit consortium consisting primarily of tribes and Alaska Native Corporations.

In 2019, the base year for the study, tribal forests represented nearly 19 million acres in the United States, including approximately 10.2 million acres of commercial forests and woodlands. A total of 345 tribal forests are managed across the nation, with 316 of those forests being held in federal trust.

“It seems like a fairly straightforward answer that when we look at the disparity in funding between other federal agencies and tribes, that [Congress] would just increase …

Urban forests facing climate risks

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| Climate

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 19 September 2022; doi:10.1038/s41558-022-01481-8

More cities are including urban forests in their climate change adaptation plans. Now, research shows that more than two-thirds of tree species across cities worldwide are facing severe climate risks, undermining their roles in climate adaptation and other ecosystem services they provide.
Nature Climate Change – Issue – nature.com science feed…

Even a small rise in temperatures could decimate North American forests

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| Pollution

From 2007 to 2017, land-based ecosystems like the vast boreal forests of Canada and the Amazon rainforest removed roughly a third of anthropogenic carbon emissions from the atmosphere. According to a slate of new scientific research published this week in Nature, however, the threats that climate change poses to these terrestrial carbon sinks are greater than previously understood.

A new study from a research team at the University of Michigan found that even a relatively small temperature increase of 1.6 degrees Celsius associated with climate change can have drastic effects on the dominant tree species in North American boreal forests, including reduced growth and increased mortality.

“Our results spell problems for the health and diversity of future regional forests,” University of Michigan forest ecologist Peter Reich, who led the study, told the University of Michigan news office.

This vast and …