An Arbor Day Tradeoff: new acacia and declining whitebark pine
Posted April 24, 2009 in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places
Earth Day gets all the pub, but I've always been kinda partial to Arbor Day. I mean, really, how often do you even think about trees?
This Arbor Day, features a couple of interesting tree stories:
In the journal Science a team of Swedish botanists describe a new tree species. Well, new to scientists anyway, I am sure folks in Somalia have always been well-aware of the pink flowering acacia that is prevalent throughout a war-torn, hilly 3,100 square mile region of their country.
The news is a lot less joyful around the whitebark pine tree. NRDC has petitioned to get the widespread high altitude species listed on the federal Endangered Species List as their numbers have been decimated as global warming continues to open the species up to a pair of threats for which the tree has evolved little or no defenses. Matt Brown's excellent Associated Press article this week pointed out the impacts that this phenomenon is already having on communities throughout the Northern Rockies as grizzly bears are forced to disperse farther and farther out in search of food items to replace the whitebark pine cones they had relied on previously...
...happy Arbor Day?
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Ruth Norton — Apr 25 2009 01:57 AM
Thanks for the information, and my granddaughter and I are two folks who think about trees! She has learned some science from me and totally soaks it up on Animal Planet, in Ranger Rick, at school...!! She's delighted to share with her friends and classmates that trees are big contributors to the oxygen on our precious planet.