Forests

A team of researchers from Austria recently developed an AI-powered drone capable of tracking moving objects through dense foliage. So much for escaping to the woods and living off the land if the machines ever rise up against us. Per the team’s research paper: While detecting and tracking moving targets through foliage is difficult (and often even impossible) in regular aerial images or videos, it becomes practically feasible with image integration … This finding together with the…

Scientists have documented a worrying trend in the rainforests of Australia: Tree lifespans have halved in the last 35 years, and it appears to be due to the effects of climate change on the ecosystems.  With these forests acting as significant carbon sinks, the consequences for the planet could be devastating, creating a feedback loop that's both caused by global warming and which then contributes to it.The signs of the increased death rate go back to the 1980s, suggesting that Earth's natural systems have responded to…

A version of this story appeared in Science, Vol 376, Issue 6595.Download PDF These are strange times for the Indigenous Nenets reindeer herders of northern Siberia. In their lands on the shores of the Arctic Ocean, bare tundra is thawing, bushes are sprouting, and willows that a generation ago struggled to reach knee height now grow 3 meters tall, hiding the reindeer. Surveys show the Nenets autonomous district, an area the size of Florida, now has four…

Credit: CC0 Public Domain Forested lands across the U.S. provide 83 million people with at least half of their water, according to a broad new study of surface water sources for more than 5,000 public water systems. 125 million people, or about 38% of the country's population, receive at least 10% of their water from forests. In the arid western U.S., 39.5 million people get more than half of their surface drinking water from…

Last fall, more than 140 world leaders made a pact to stop deforestation within the decade, not long after dozens of countries vowed to conserve nearly a third of their land. But while policymakers deliberated, trees continued to get chopped down. In the tropics, where nearly all deforestation takes place, farming, logging, and wildfires destroyed more than 11.1 million hectares (27 million acres) of trees last year, an area roughly the size of Virginia, according to a new analysis by the nonprofit World Resources…

Substituting 20% of meat from cattle with microbial protein — a meat alternative produced in fermentation tanks — by 2050 could halve deforestation, a new analysis by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) now published in Nature finds.“The food system is at the root of a third of global greenhouse gas emissions, with ruminant meat production being the single largest source,” says Florian Humpenöder, researcher at PIK and lead author of the study. That is because more and more forests that store a lot of…