Forests

The abandoned fieldstone walls of New England are every bit as iconic to the region as lobster pots, town greens, sap buckets and fall foliage. They seem to be everywhere – a latticework of dry, lichen-crusted stone ridges separating a patchwork of otherwise moist soils. Stone walls can be found here and there in other states, but only in New England are they nearly ubiquitous. That’s due to a regionally unique combination of hard crystalline bedrock, glacial soils and farms with patchworks of small land parcels. Nearly all were built by European settlers and their draft animals, who scuttled glacial stones from agricultural fields and pastures outward to fencelines and boundaries, then tossed or stacked them as lines. Though the oldest walls date to 1607, most were built in the agrarian century between the American Revolution and the cultural shift toward cities and industry after the Civil War. The mass of stone that farmers moved in that century staggers the m...

Earth’s boreal forests circle our planet’s far northern reaches, just south of the Arctic’s treeless tundra. If the planet wears an Arctic ice cap, then the boreal forests are a loose-knit headband wrapped around its ears, covering large portions of Alaska, Canada, Scandinavia and Siberia. The boreal region’s soils have long buffered the planet against warming by storing huge quantities of carbon and keeping it out of the atmosphere. Its remoteness has historically protected its forests and wetlands from extensive human impact. These two traits rank boreal forests among the most important ecosystems on Earth. In addition, numerous species of mammals, fish, plants, insects and birds make these forests home. For over two centuries, scientists have recognized that climate plays a key role in determining the geographic zones of plant communities. Because boreal forests and soils face subzero winters and short summers, these forests and the animals that li...

Strong winds blew across mountain slopes after a record-setting warm, dry summer. Small fires began to blow up into huge conflagrations. Towns in crisis scrambled to escape as fires bore down. This could describe any number of recent events, in places as disparate as Colorado, California, Canada and Hawaii. But this fire disaster happened over 110 years ago in the Northern Rocky Mountains of Idaho and Montana. The “Big Burn” of 1910 still holds the record for the largest fire season in the Northern Rockies. Hundreds of fires burned over 3 million acres – roughly the size of Connecticut – most in just two days. The fires destroyed towns, killed 86 people and galvanized public policies committed to putting out every fire. Many residents of Wallace, Idaho, fled on trains ahead of the 1910 blaze. Volunteers who stayed saved part of the town, but about a third of it burned. R.H. McKay/U.S. Forest Service...

The U.S. government is investing over US$7 billion in the coming years to try to manage the nation’s escalating wildfire crisis. That includes a commitment to treat at least 60 million acres in the next 10 years by expanding forest-thinning efforts and controlled burns. While that sounds like a lot – 60 million acres is about the size of Wyoming – it’s nowhere close to enough to treat every acre that needs it. So, where can taxpayers get the biggest bang for the buck? I’m a fire ecologist in Montana. In a new study, my colleagues and I mapped out where forest treatments can do the most to simultaneously protect communities – by preventing wildfires from turning into disasters – and also protect the forests and the climate we rely on, by keeping carbon out of the atmosphere and stored in healthy soils and trees. Wildfires are becoming more severe Forests and fires have always been intertwined in the West. Fires in dry conifer forests...

Across Appalachia, September marks the start of ginseng season, when thousands of people roam the hills searching for hard-to-reach patches of this highly prized plant. Many people know ginseng as an ingredient in vitamin supplements or herbal tea. That ginseng is grown commercially on farms in Wisconsin and Ontario, Canada. In contrast, wild American ginseng is an understory plant that can live for decades in the forests of the Appalachian Mountains. The plant’s taproot grows throughout its life and sells for hundreds of dollars per pound, primarily to East Asian customers who consume it for health reasons. Because it’s such a valuable medicinal plant, harvesting ginseng has helped families in mountainous regions of states such as Kentucky, West Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina and Ohio weather economic ups and downs since the late 1700s. Most harvesting takes place in Appalachia’s long-enduring forest commons – forests across the region that histo...