Researchers : "the [destructive] changes in bird habitats and behavior between now and 2070 will equal the evolutionary and adaptive shifts that normally occur over tens of thousands of years."

 

 

SF Gate

The silence of the birds: When nature gets quiet, be very afraid

By Mark Morford on September 14, 2015 5:27 PM


Image 2 of 9 | The silence of the birds: Be afraid
Researchers say "the [destructive] changes in bird habitats and behavior between now and 2070 will equal the evolutionary and adaptive shifts that normally occur over tens of thousands of years." Yay humans!
Brutal wildfire images too much to bear? Fatigued by non-stop news of extreme weather, record-low snowpack, emaciated polar bears, unprecedented this and fast-receding that, a natural world that appears to be going more or less insane?
Maybe you need some quiet. Get outside, sit yourself down and let nature’s innate healing powers soothe your aching heart.
Sounds good, right? Sounds refreshing. Sounds… well, not quite right at all. Not anymore.
Have you heard? Or more accurately, not heard? Vicious fires and vanishing ice floes aside, there’s yet another ominous sign that all is not well with the natural world: it’s getting quiet out there. Too quiet.
Behold, this bit over in Outside magazine, profiling the sweet, touching life and times of 77-year-old bioacoustician and soundscape artist Bernie Kraus, author of “The Great Animal Orchestra” (2012), TED talker, ballet scorer, and a “pioneer in the field of soundscape ecology.”
Krause, last written about on SFGate back in 2007, is a man whose passion and profession has been making field recordings of the world’s “biophony” for going on 45 years, setting up his sensitive equipment in roughly the same places around the world to record nature’s (normally) stunningly diverse aural symphony – all the birds, bees, beavers, wolves, babbling streams, fluttering wings, the brush of trees and the rush of rivers – truly, the very pulse and thrum of life itself.

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The Beauty of Nature : The tree is more than just a sink for carbon, it is an agency for chemical weathering that removes carbon from the air and locks it up in carbonate rock.

Description  :  Boomstronken; foto door Fruggo, juni 2003.
Attribution: Fruggo from nl
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported
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New Research Shows Tree Roots Regulate CO2, Keep Climate Stable

By Tim Radford

Climate News Network | February 19, 2014 8:30 am

The argument, put forward by a team from Oxford and Sheffield Universities in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, begins with temperature. Warmer climates mean more vigorous tree growth and more leaf litter, and more organic content in the soil. So the tree’s roots grow more vigorously, said Dr. Christopher Doughty of Oxford and colleagues.
They get into the bedrock, and break up the rock into its constituent minerals. Once that happens, the rock starts to weather, combining with carbon dioxide. This weathering draws carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, and in the process cools the planet down a little. So mountain ecosystems—mountain forests are usually wet and on conspicuous layers of rock—are in effect part of the global thermostat, preventing catastrophic overheating.
The tree is more than just a sink for carbon, it is an agency for chemical weathering that removes carbon from the air and locks it up in carbonate rock.
That mountain weathering and forest growth are part of the climate system has never been in much doubt: the questions have always been about how big a forest’s role might be, and how to calculate its contribution.
Keeping climate stable
U.S. scientists recently studied the rainy slopes of New Zealand’s Southern Alps to begin to put a value on mountain ecosystem processes. Dr. Doughty and his colleagues measured tree roots at varying altitudes in the tropical rain forests of Peru, from the Amazon lowlands to 3,000 meters of altitude in the higher Andes.
They measured the growth to 30 cm below the surface every three months and did so for a period of years. They recorded the thickness of the soil’s organic layer, and they matched their observations with local temperatures, and began to calculate the rate at which tree roots might turn Andean granite into soil.
Then they scaled up the process, and extended it through long periods of time. Their conclusion: that forests served to moderate temperatures in a much hotter world 65 million years ago.


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Report: Trees Grow Faster, Store More Carbon as They Age

Jan 16, 2014 by Sci-News.com

According to an international group of scientists led by Dr Nate Stephenson of the US Geological Survey, most of tropical and temperate tree species grow more quickly and sequester more carbon as they grow older.

Eucalyptus bridgesiana tree.

The report, published in the journal Nature, is based on repeated measurements of 673,046 individual trees belonging to 403 species, some going back more than 80 years.
“Rather than slowing down or ceasing growth and carbon uptake, as we previously assumed, most of the oldest trees in forests around the world actually grow faster, taking up more carbon. A large tree may put on weight equivalent to an entire small tree in a year,” said co-author Dr Richard Condit from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.
“This report would not have been possible without long-term records of individual tree growth. It was remarkable how we were able to examine this question on a global level, thanks to the sustained efforts of many programs and individuals,” added co-author Dr Mark Harmon of Oregon State University.
“Extraordinary growth of some species, such as Australian mountain ash – also known as eucalyptus – (Eucalyptus regnans), and the coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) is not limited to a few species,” Dr Stephenson said.
“Rather, rapid growth in giant trees is the global norm and can exceed 600 kg per year in the largest individuals. In human terms, it is as if our growth just keeps accelerating after adolescence, instead of slowing down. By that measure, humans could weigh half a ton by middle age, and well over a ton at retirement.”
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