SEARCH
A great gift for crisis deniers!
Humoring the Horror of the
Converging Emergencies
94 color pages
$24.99 now $15!
Or read FREE online!
Twitter
Ping this story
in social media:
del.icio.us
Digg
Newsvine
NowPublic
Reddit
Facebook
StumbleUpon
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Where Few Trees Have Gone Before: Mountain Meadows http://apocadocs.com/s.pl?1360860825
... with a warming climate, snow has begun melting earlier and growing seasons have lengthened; that extra time with little or no snow cover has given trees a boost. As a result, tree occupation rose from 8 percent in 1950 to 35 percent in 2008, reports a U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service-funded study published last October in Landscape Ecology.
At a time when so many forests are threatened, aren't more trees something to celebrate? Not necessarily, say the authors of the new study. These tall trees block light that meadow grasses, shrubs and wildflowers need to survive. Once trees become established, the surrounding seed banks of native grasses tend to fade away. The meadows' "biodiversity value is much larger than the amount of area they occupy," explains lead author Harold S. J. Zald, postdoctoral research associate at Oregon State University, who hatched the idea for the study while backpacking in the Cascade Range. The researchers do not yet know which plant or animal species would be endangered.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
[Read more stories about:
climate impacts, forests, sixth extinction]
|
|
|
New!:
| |
|
No reader quips yet -- be the first! | |
|
Got a PaniQuip?
|
|
|
We reserve the
right to reuse, remove, or refuse any entry.
| |
|
|
'Doc Jim says:
|
|
|
|
Apocaiku:
Not too cool for school./
Never have mountain meadows/
been made in the shade.
|
|
|
|
Want to explore more?
Try the PaniCloud!
|