Category Archives: Environment

MAPS: History of deforestation in the United States (updated)

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These maps illustrate the history of deforestation in the United States by “showing the changes in virgin forest cover in the United States.” I have also tacked together an animated version of these maps in order to put the historical loss of virgin forest into a sense of proportion (there’s a three second delay between frames).

Undoubtedly, these forest resources played an important role in the development of the United States. However, the dramatic decline of virgin forest in the United States has impacted biodiversity. For example, the extreme loss of virgin forests has been attributed to the demise of the ivory-billed woodpecker (Campephilus principalis) — a large species of woodpecker that is most likely extinct or exists in very small, fragmented populations.

Admittedly, it is difficult to determine what first nature looked like or to define virgin forest, because Native Americans certainly impacted the natural landscapes of North America. More via Southern Forests For The Future (emphasis added):

Although definitions vary, a primary (or “virgin”) forest often means a forest of native species where there are no clearly visible indications of human disturbance and where ecological processes are not significantly disturbed. Identifying primary forests with precision is difficult, since Native Americans used fire to manage forests prior to European settlement. Given this limitation, one way to approach a definition of virgin forests in the South is those that have not been cleared since European settlement.

At the time of European settlement in North America, such forests covered nearly all of the East Coast. During the next two centuries, agriculture was the most important driver of forest loss in the South. By 1850, large portions of original forest had been cleared for agriculture, although substantial areas remained. Lands along the Atlantic coastal plain, which were the most densely populated areas of the South, saw the greatest loss of forests over this period. However, western areas of the region were largely unsettled, and land in Florida and the Appalachians was difficult to access, clear, and farm.

After the Civil War ended in 1865, the era of industrial logging began in earnest in the South. New railroads moved workers and heavy equipment and transported cut logs to mills and markets, making logging newly profitable throughout the region. The railroads themselves required vast quantities of lumber for crossties. Between 1870 and 1920, the South lost tens of millions of acres of forest.

By the end of the twentieth century, virtually no substantial tracts of virgin forest remained in the South. Remnants can be found in protected lands in parts of the Great Smoky Mountains and in southwestern Florida, but nearly all the South’s current extensive forested area has been previously logged. The remaining forests are located in areas that were difficult to access due to steep or swampy terrain.

Images were found here, here, here, here, here, and here.

UPDATE 1 (21 Jan. 12):

This map depicts the concentration of biomass within the United States. This map is different than the maps above, because the earlier maps depict virgin forest cover and the subsequent loss of virgin forest cover. More via NOAA:

Trees are one of Earth’s largest banks for storing the carbon that gets emitted by natural processes and human activities. Forests cover about 30 percent of the planet’s surface, and as much as 45 percent of the carbon stored on land is tied up in forests.

But did global forests hold more or less carbon in the past? And could they store more in the future? Does it matter where those trees are growing? Scientists really don’t know. But before they can find out, they’ll need a reliable inventory of what is growing today.

Josef Kellndorfer and Wayne Walker of the Woods Hole Research Center (WHRC) recently worked with colleagues at the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Geological Survey to create such an inventory for the United States. The map above was built from the National Biomass and Carbon Dataset (NBCD), released in 2011. It depicts the concentration of biomass—a measure of the amount of organic carbon—stored in the trunks, limbs, and leaves of trees. The darkest greens reveal the areas with the densest, tallest, and most robust forest growth.

Over six years, researchers assembled the national forest map from space-based radar, satellite sensors, computer models, and a massive amount of ground-based data. It is possibly the highest resolution and most detailed view of forest structure and carbon storage ever assembled for any country.

Forests in the U.S. were mapped down to a scale of 30 meters, or roughly 10 computer display pixels for every hectare of land (4 pixels per acre). They divided the country into 66 mapping zones and ended up mapping 265 million segments of the American land surface. Kellndorfer estimates that their mapping database includes measurements of about five million trees.

“Forests are a key element for human activity,” says Kellndorfer. “Resource managers need to see forests down to the disturbance resolution—the scale at which parking lots or developments or farms are carved out by deforestation. We have to know how much we have, and where, in order to conduct sound management and harvesting.”

REDISCOVERED SPECIES: Camera trap captures image of endangered Persian leopard in Afghanistan

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Image via the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Afghanistan Program

The Persian leopard (Panthera pardus ciscaucasica) was “long thought to have disappeared from” Afghanistan. However, a camera trap captured an image of one cat, which suggests that a breeding population may still occur in parts of the war-torn country. More via National Geographic:

The newly released photographs, taken in the fall, include this September shot of an adult leopard investigating the camera, “appearing to threaten it with canines exposed,” according to the Wildlife Conservation Society, which helped set up the camera traps. The images are “indisputable proof” that the big cat is hanging on in the region, the group said.

Via io9

CLIMATE CHANGE: Gov. Rick Perry fails on climate change and on other significant environmental issues

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Via NPR:

Perry is a strong opponent of the Environmental Protection Agency and he has expressed doubts that human activity is causing climate change.

JOHN BURNETT: Last month at a breakfast speech in Bedford, New Hampshire, when Rick Perry was asked about climate change, he gave this answer.

Governor RICK PERRY: There are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated…

BURNETT: Perry said there are a substantial number of scientists who’ve manipulated the data so they would have dollars rolling into their projects. The governor went on to say that weekly, indeed daily, scientists are abandoning the theory of manmade global warming. Perry has long been a climate science doubter, a position that has endeared him to certain factions of the electorate. In his book, “Fed Up!” – a screed against the federal government – Perry calls global warming a contrived phony mess that’s falling apart under its own weight.

His statement in New Hampshire prompted blowback from Andrew Dessler, a prominent professor of atmospheric sciences at Perry’s alma mater, Texas A&M University. Dessler fired off an angry editorial that appeared in papers around the country.

ANDREW DESSLER: Well, if Governor Perry wants to talk to us, we can explain to him that the science of climate change is nearly 200 years old and at this point, we have a really well validated and sophisticated understanding of how the climate system works.

BURNETT: The U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the science academy of every major industrialized nation believe that human activities, such as burning fossil fuels and cutting down forests, have contributed to increased concentrations of greenhouses gases in the atmosphere, which is heating the planet. Andrew Dessler says climate change is indisputably part of Texas’ current calamity.

DESSLER: And what that means is it makes the heat more extreme, it increases evaporation from the soil, that makes the drought more extreme. So we can be pretty confident that we’ve made the hellish summer that we just have gone through and we’re sort of still going through, we’ve made this worse than it would have been.

BURNETT: The Perry campaign did not respond to emails requesting clarification of his remarks on climate change. If Rick Perry disdains climate scientists, that’s nothing like his animosity toward the Environmental Protection Agency. Texas has more polluting industrial plants than any other state and Texas SUVs and coal-burning power plants spew out more carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, than any other state. The Perry administration has fought the regional EPA office in Dallas, which has been more aggressive under President Obama in trying to bring Texas polluters into line with federal regulations.

Continue reading this article at NPR.

AIR POLLUTION: EPA “completely blindsided” by President Obama’s decision to scrap tougher smog rules

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Image via Fanboy30 on Flickr

President Obama has, in the past, made decisions that have been unpopular with his base. For example, the President extended the unpopular Bush Tax Cuts, which were never paid for. Now, he’s unexpectedly scrapped the implementation of EPA’s tougher smog rules.

However, he’s undoubtedly made decisions that have been popular with his base. Though, it seems that the former have drawn more attention than the latter, because arguably, again, the American people lose at the expense of corporate favoritism or over some perceived threat that doesn’t actually exist.

The effects of air pollution are quantifiable. Air pollution costs governments millions in healthcare costs, and poor air quality costs people their lives. In fact, EPA “estimates indicate the stricter [smog] rule would have cut asthma attacks in [certain] areas, as well as reduc[e] premature deaths.”

The President is taking a huge gamble by compromising with Republicans too much and by compromising over issues that are considered significant to his base. Certainly, it doesn’t matter how much the President gives up, because Republicans would rather watch Obama fail even if the President’s policies could be helpful to the American public. Also, the Republicans never seem to give the President credit, without attacking him, even though he’s made huge concessions to them. In fact, although “Republicans said [that] scrapping the smog rule was the right thing to do . . . they hammered Obama anyway.”

Perhaps the President truly believes that abandoning tougher air pollution regulations will assist economic recovery. However, the economy is most certainly so damaged by Bush-era policies that I seriously doubt rolling back environmental policies and regulations will actually have a meaningful, positive effect on economic recovery or job recovery. In fact, rolling back environmental regulations will have the opposite effect or a negative impact, I believe, by making people sicker and less productive.

Obviously, sick people aren’t as productive as healthy people, so employers or corporations and small businesses lose profits when their employees can’t be productive due to sicknesses that have been brought on by environmental degradation. Furthermore, since some employers provide their employees with health insurance, employers certainly pay more when their employees suffer from sicknesses associated with environmental degradation.

Also, the healthcare system (or lack thereof) of the United States isn’t a system that’s affordable. People have lost their homes simply because they got sick. Thus, I believe it’s a terrible idea to abandon environmental regulations and policies that make (or will make) the environment cleaner and ensure that more people remain healthy.

Furthermore, by abandoning environmental policies, the President is sending the message to the American people and to the international community that the environment is less important than corporate profits — despite the fact that without the environment, there can be no corporations, markets, or societies, because all of the goods and services that we depend on come directly from the environment. Also, even though the new smog rules will certainly cost corporations capital to implement, these rules could spur the development of new, useful technologies and save corporations money for the aforementioned reasons. Ultimately, everyone loses when we abandon environmentalism for profit — people, employers, and corporate profits.

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CONSERVATION: Scientists introduce non-native species in an attempt to save island ecosystem

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Image via Joachim S. Müller on Flickr.

Scientists are “re-wilding islands and even continents” in order to remedy sickened or damaged ecosystems. In one example of re-wilding ecosystems, scientists introduced a species of giant tortoise, from Aldabra Atoll in the Seychelles, to take on the ecological role that was played by a similar species of giant tortoise that went extinct on Ile aux Aigrettes, which is an island associated with Mauritius. More via Scientific America:

In 1965 the largely denuded 25 hectares of [Ile aux Aigrettes] were declared a nature reserve. But even in the absence of logging, the slow-growing ebony forests failed to thrive. Why? Because they had lost the animals that ate their fruit and dispersed their seeds. So in 2000 scientists relocated four giant tortoises from the nearby Aldabra atoll in the Seychelles, and by 2009 a total of 19 such introduced tortoises roamed the island, eating the large fruits and leaving behind more than 500 dense patches of seedlings. The team reported its results in April in the journal Current Biology.

For this tiny island, at least, rewilding appears to have worked. And that holds out hope for other restoration ecology projects in the midst of the sixth mass extinction in the earth’s history. In Europe conservationists have received €3.1 million to begin bringing bison, bovines and horses back to “abandoned” agricultural lands in places such as western Spain or the Carpathian Mountains. Ecologists have proposed repopulating parts of the U.S. with elephants, which would replace extinct mastodons. The Dutch, for their part, have already built what amounts to a Pleistocene park at Oostvaardersplassen, adding Konik horses and Heck cattle to replace extinct wild horses and cattle.

Of course, humans have a mixed track record when it comes to interfering in natural ecological systems—the introduction of the cane toad to Australia to manage other pests has resulted in a frog march of havoc across the continent. “There are no guarantees when trying to manipulate nature,” notes ecologist Mark A. Davis of Macalester College in Minnesota. Others argue that humans should fix what they have broken. “There is no place on this planet that humans have not interfered with, and it is time for us to become actively involved in engineering solutions,” says marine biologist Ove Hoegh-Guldberg of the University of Queensland in Australia. “There are no other options except extinction at this point.”

Continue reading this article at Scientific America.