Category Archives: Forestry

SWEDEN — A new dissertation on forest industrial production systems, from researcher Per Nordin at Linnaeus University, reveals that successful regeneration measures are crucial for sustainable forestry. To ensure successful plant establishment, it is important to make decisions based on factors at regional, stand, and microenvironment levels. …In the study Per Nordin examined what combinations of regeneration methods result in low plant mortality and high growth. It also explored the potential for using digital tools in regeneration planning. The research was conducted through field experiments and a field study in which digital tools were integrated in analyses and testing. …The study found that the quality of soil preparation was a crucial factor in plant survival and growth. The study also revealed that soil disturbance was influenced by the choice of soil preparation method, and that natural regeneration benefited from all methods used in the experiments.

Federal MPs and Australian celebrities have backed putting an end to native forest logging in Tasmania. The demand comes after a group of activists rallied together to protect the habitat of Swift Parrots, following Victoria’s decision last week to ban logging by the end of the year. In an open letter released by the Australian Institute, independent federal MPs Zali Steggall, Zoe Daniel and Sophie Scamps put their names forward, calling on Premier Jeremy Rockliff to protect Tasmania’s native forests. Olympic legend Ian Thorpe, acclaimed authors Richard Flanagan and Tim Winton, and 2017 Australian of the Year Tim Flannery also signed the letter, as well as Australian actors Claudia Karvan, Essie Davis and Miriam Margoly, MONA music director Brian Ritchie, and Lime Cordiale lead singer Oliver Leimbach.

BRUSSELS – The EU said on Tuesday it is doubling its aerial firefighting fleet for the summer of 2023, citing challenges such as increasing forest fires due to the climate crisis. “The last few years have seen our greatest challenges so far”, Commissioner for Crisis Management Janez Lenarcic said, adding that in the last decade there had been on average a 350 percent increase in requests for assistance from its RescEU programme. “Disasters are occurring with increased frequency and intensity”, Lenarcic added, referring to wildfire risks in areas that have not previously been vulnerable and floods in Belgium, Germany and Italy. For the coming wildfire season the RescEU firefighting aircraft reserve will include 24 planes and four helicopters from 10 member states, the EU said. In addition, 11 member states will send almost 450 firefighters who will be based in France, Greece and Portugal. Southern Europe is bracing for a summer of ferocious drought…

A Gisborne-based forest contracting business owner is “devastated” by having to pull the pin on his 23-year-old company.  Robert Stubbs owns Stubbs Contracting and forestry has been his life. Prior to owning the business, he spent 10 years working for others in the sector.  But after much angst and thinking, last week he shut up shop, and on Monday he was sitting on a forest skid site overseeing the removal of his harvest contracting gear.  …  “The market is in a downturn situation, for, I don’t know, probably the third or fourth time since the beginning of Covid,” he said.  This was a situation a number of years in the making, he said – his costs had gone up, margins to make money were slim and as export log prices had kept dropping, forest owners dropped harvesting rates and pulled back on how many trees they wanted to harvest.

David Lindenmayer

Chris Taylor

By the end of the year, Victoria’s trouble-plagued native forest industry will end – six years ahead of schedule. The state’s iconic mountain ash forests and endangered wildlife will at last be safe from chainsaws. And there will be no shortage of wood – there’s more than enough plantation timber to fill the gap. The announcement by Premier Daniel Andrews is excellent news for forests, the state’s economy, and its threatened species. …Ending native forest logging is long overdue. For decades, we’ve known of how much damage it does to biodiversity. Logging vast areas of Victoria’s native forests over the past several decades has pushed many once-common animals, such as the greater glider, to become endangered. …Our research has catalogued the damage done to produce low-value products such as woodchips and paper pulp. … The state-owned logging company, VicForests, has been running at a loss for many years. 

The Japanese government is planning to accelerate a push to cut down and replace cedar trees. Cedar pollen triggers hay fever, causing suffering for millions of people in Japan. Prime Minister Kishida Fumio said …The goal is to cut the pollen count in half over 30 years. The strategy calls for a roughly 20-percent reduction in artificially planted cedar forests over a decade. That translates to 70,000 hectares a year, 40 percent higher than the current number. The government also hopes to create more demand for cedar as lumber by promoting the wood for home construction. The cleared forests are to be planted with other species or a strain of cedar that produces less pollen. The government wants more than 90 percent of cedar saplings to be low-pollen types in 10 years.

The announced end of native forest logging in Victoria was met with joy from conservationists and shock from industry workers. …But there is an aspect of the story which hasn’t been told. The end of native timber harvesting is an opportunity for Victoria’s First Peoples to tend these forests again. Our voices have not been heard in this debate, but we have much to do on Forest Country. You might think an end to logging, naturally means a return to wilderness. But wilderness as an ideal is a concept which has undermined the rights of Indigenous people. For tens of thousands of years, we worked with Forest Country to ensure its health. When colonists first arrived the land was often described as resembling parklands. …In some places this change allowed wilderness to set in and become more fire prone. [We have] an opportunity to rethink what Forest Country looks like.

Matthew Torenius

At a sawmill near Hobart, the ear-piercing screech of giant steel saws slicing through Tasmanian hardwood reverberates through a corrugated iron shed.  Watching on is Matthew Torenius, whose family has been milling logs for the local building industry since the 1950s.  “They used to harvest their own trees and bring them back to the sawmill,” he said.  “And then from the 1980s, it was just purely sawmilling.”   There are 16 people employed at his facility, where large logs sourced from native forests are cut into smaller sections for flooring, architraves, and joinery.  But the future of Tasmania’s native timber industry is once again in the spotlight following a major political decision across Bass Strait earlier this week.  The Victorian government has announced the end of native timber logging, bringing forward the demise of a local industry that was previously set to be phased out by 2030.

When the forest fauna goes to sleep, a tree frog prowls the coastal Atlantic Forest of Brazil during nightly expeditions in search of the milk fruit tree, drawn to the delectable nectar inside its trumpet-shaped flowers and the creamy white fruit. Xenohyla truncata frogs emerged from the flowers with pollen grains stuck to their backs, providing evidence that frogs may act as pollinators. It was the first time a frog – or any amphibian – has been observed pollinating a plant. Measuring about 3-4cm long and native to the state of Rio De Janeiro, the Xenohyla truncata – more commonly known as Izecksohn’s Brazilian Treefrog – has unlocked a new understanding of ecological interaction between flowering plants and amphibians.

ITANAGAR, INDIA — A new green tree frog species has been discovered from Arunachal Pradesh by a team of researchers from Dehradun (Uttarakhand)-based Wildlife Institute of India, Dresden (Germany)-based Senckenberg Natural History Collections, and the Namdapha Tiger Reserve (NTR). The frog has been named the Patkai green tree frog (Gracixalus patkaiensis), after the historical Patkai hills range, where the NTR lies. …The newly discovered Patkai green tree frog was found in a unique habitat inside the evergreen forest of the tiger reserve, characterised by marshy area covered with cane, bamboo, rattan palm, fern and wild zingiber. …The Patkai green tree frog is a small species with a body size of 23-26 millimetres. The call of this frog is very similar to that of insects, and these frogs breed in swampy areas during monsoon season.

Researchers have found that bats specialized to feed on insects within the dense canopy of tropical forests are disproportionately affected by hydropower development. The study in Peninsular Malaysia adds to a growing body of evidence demonstrating how hydropower developments impoverish tropical ecosystems. Although forest-specialist bats were lost from the flooded landscape, bats that forage along forest edges and in open space were still present. To minimize localized extinctions, the researchers advocate a preventive rather than mitigative approach to hydropower planning that prioritizes habitat connectivity and avoids creating isolated forest patches.