Tootfinder

Clear-cutting forests linked to 18-fold increase in frequency and size of floods #environment

Clear-cutting forests linked to 18-fold increase in frequency and size of floods
Clear-cutting can make catastrophic floods 18 times more frequent with effects lasting more than 40 years, according to a new UBC study.

🤦 As Indonesia reclaims forests from palm oil, smallholders bear brunt of enforcement
https://news.mongabay.com/2025/07/as-indonesia-reclaims-forests-from-palm-oil-smallholders-bear-brunt-of-enforcement/

As Indonesia reclaims forests from palm oil, smallholders bear brunt of enforcement
JAKARTA — Indonesia has launched a sweeping and militarized crackdown on illegal forest use, reclaiming millions of hectares of land — but civil society groups warn the campaign is displacing Indigenous peoples while sparing corporate offenders and entrenching land inequality. Under a regulation issued in January, President Prabowo Subianto established a task force to crack down on […]

Forests need human intervention to adapt to climate change, as study shows they lag centuries behind. #climatechange #climatesolutions #climate

Forests are lagging centuries behind in climate adaptation
Scientists found forests need one to two centuries to adapt to climate changes, far slower than current global warming.

Seedlings (XPd on PC)
There's some strange new forms of life in the New Zealand forests, take control of one and explore.
So this is a short puzzle platformer with a neat catch: most of what you'll see on the screen are images captured directly from the forests of New Zealand. Using real images as a backdrop is certainly not a new idea, but it's used remarkably well here.
The gameplay is simple enough: as an apparently sentient seed, you are tasked with travers…

Splittable Spanning Trees and Balanced Forests in Dense Random Graphs
David Gillman, Jacob Platnick, Dana Randall
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12707 https://…

Splittable Spanning Trees and Balanced Forests in Dense Random Graphs
Weighted equitable partitioning of a graph has been of interest lately due to several applications, including redistricting, network algorithms, and image decomposition. Weighting a partition according to the spanning-tree metric has been of mathematical and practical interest because it typically favors partitions with more compact pieces. An appealing algorithm suggested by Charikar et al. is to sample a random spanning tree and remove k-1 edges, producing a random forest. If the components o…

Fascinating article, from the island of Seil:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/aug/15/biology-mycorrhizal-fungi-map-restoring-world-forests

Seed-dispersing animals are in decline, impacting forests and the climate: Study https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2025/08/seed-dispersing-animals-are-in-decline-impacting-forests-and-the-climate-study/

Seed-dispersing animals are in decline, impacting forests and the climate: Study
A lot of attention has been paid to the decrease in bee populations and other pollinators, but a recent review article makes the case that we should be equally alarmed by the declining numbers of seed-dispersing animals, which are crucial for growing healthy forests. “Both are important and should be taken into account in restoration […]

🌍 Satellite data reveal African grasslands' carbon uptake rises with rainfall, unlike forests and savannas
https://phys.org/news/2025-07-satellite-reveal-african-grasslands-carbon.html

Satellite data reveal African grasslands' carbon uptake rises with rainfall, unlike forests and savannas
Africa is a source of uncertainty in carbon cycle calculations. By some estimates, the continent's landscapes emit 2.1 billion tons more carbon dioxide than they take up each year—about equal to 1.5 times the annual emissions from coal-fired power plants. But other estimates are almost the complete opposite, suggesting that the continent's copious plant matter takes up 2.0 billion more tons of carbon dioxide per year than it releases.

Oldies but Goldies: The Potential of Character N-grams for Romanian Texts
Dana Lupsa, Sanda-Maria Avram
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.15650 https://

Oldies but Goldies: The Potential of Character N-grams for Romanian Texts
This study addresses the problem of authorship attribution for Romanian texts using the ROST corpus, a standard benchmark in the field. We systematically evaluate six machine learning techniques: Support Vector Machine (SVM), Logistic Regression (LR), k-Nearest Neighbors (k-NN), Decision Trees (DT), Random Forests (RF), and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), employing character n-gram features for classification. Among these, the ANN model achieved the highest performance, including perfect clas…

Revisiting Randomization in Greedy Model Search
Xin Chen, Jason M. Klusowski, Yan Shuo Tan, Chang Yu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.15643 https://

Revisiting Randomization in Greedy Model Search
Combining randomized estimators in an ensemble, such as via random forests, has become a fundamental technique in modern data science, but can be computationally expensive. Furthermore, the mechanism by which this improves predictive performance is poorly understood. We address these issues in the context of sparse linear regression by proposing and analyzing an ensemble of greedy forward selection estimators that are randomized by feature subsampling -- at each iteration, the best feature is s…

"Young secondary forests may be the planet’s most overlooked carbon sink"
#Trees #Environment

Young secondary forests may be the planet’s most overlooked carbon sink
Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries. As governments and corporations scramble to meet climate pledges, the search for reliable and scalable carbon removal strategies has turned increasingly toward forests. But while tree planting captures the public imagination, a new study suggests a simpler, less […]

At least four firefighters have been injured over the last week while battling three wildfires in Northern California forests that are burning amid extreme heat in steep, bone-dry terrain, fire officials said Monday.
One firefighter combating the barely contained Green fire in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest sustained a blunt force trauma wound while working on the fire line Saturday
Another firefighter suffered a heat-related injury Sunday, she said. Both were treated at a h…

At least four firefighters injured while battling Northern California wildfires
At least four firefighters have been injured over the last week while battling three wildfires in Northern California forests that are burning amid extreme heat in steep, bone-dry terrain, fire officials said Monday.

Inversions in parking functions
Kyle Celano, Jennifer Elder, Kimberly P. Hadaway, Pamela E. Harris, Amanda Priestley, Gabe Udell
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11587 https://…

Inversions in parking functions
In this paper, we obtain a q-exponential generating function for inversions on parking functions via symmetric function theory and also through a direct bijection to rooted labeled forests. We then apply these techniques to unit interval parking functions to give analogous results. We conclude by introducing a probabilistic approach through which we obtain formulas for the total number of inversions and several other statistics across all parking functions and other sets of words closed under r…

💔 Climate-protecting carbon sinks of EU forests are declining
#forests

Climate-protecting carbon sinks of EU forests are declining
Forests cover about 40% of the EU's land area. Between 1990 and 2022, they absorbed around 10% of the continent's man-made carbon emissions. However, the carbon dioxide absorption capacity of forests, also known as carbon sinks, is becoming increasingly weaker.

Ich will in diesem Jahr erneut über das Problem der sterbenden Wälder berichten. Unser Bericht bei @… klingt lapidar: der Wald ist kein CO2-Speicher mehr, sondern ein Emittent, so wie Industrie, Verkehr oder der Gebäudesektor. Doch es ist dramatisch: Ohne funktionierende Wälder werden wir die Klimaziele nie erreichen.
Ich freue mich, hier über Input von Euch oder Zusa…

Forest abandonment and poor management threaten Europe's precious carbon sink
Carbon sequestration is one of the most important functions of a forest. Over the past 20 years, European forests have failed to fulfil this role.

Crosslisted article(s) found for cs.IR. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.IR/new
[1/1]:
- Annotating Satellite Images of Forests with Keywords from a Specialized Corpus in the Context of ...
Nathalie Neptune, Josiane Mothe

The effects of continuum fitting on Lyman-$\alpha$ forest correlations
Nicolas Busca, James Rich, Julian Bautista, Andrei Cuceu, Andreu Font-Ribera, Julien Guy, Hiram K. Herrera-Alcantar, Julianna Stermer, Christophe Balland, J. Aguilar, S. Ahlen, D. Bianchi, D. Brooks, T. Claybaugh, A. de la Macorra, P. Doel, S. Ferraro, J. E. Forero-Romero, E. Gazta\~naga, C. Gordon, G. Gutierrez, M. Ishak, R. Kehoe, D. Kirkby, A. Kremin, M. Landriau, L. Le Guillou, C. Magneville, P. Martini, R. Miqu…

The effects of continuum fitting on Lyman-$α$ forest correlations
Correlations of fluctuations of the flux in Lyman-$α$ forests of high-redshift quasars have been observed by the Baryonic Acoustic Oscillation Spectroscopy Survey (BOSS) and the Dark Energy Spectroscopy Instrument (DESI) survey where they have revealed the effects of baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO). In order to fit the correlation functions to a physical model and thereby constrain cosmological parameters, it is necessary to take into account the effects of fitting the observed spectra to a…

About three-quarters of fungi are “dark taxa” – species known only by their DNA sequence, as physical specimens have not been found.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/aug/15/biology-mycorrhizal-fungi-map-restoring-world-fore…

Decade-long study shows reduced winter snowpack impairs forests' ability to store carbon
https://phys.org/news/2025-07-decade-winter-snowpack-impairs-forests.html

Reaction-diffusion models of invasive tree pest spread: quantifying the spread of oak processionary moth in the UK
Jamie P. McKeown, Laura E. Wadkin, Nick G. Parker, Andrew Golightly, Andrew W. Baggaley
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14166

Reaction-diffusion models of invasive tree pest spread: quantifying the spread of oak processionary moth in the UK
UK woodlands, forests, and urban treescapes are under threat from invasive species, exacerbated by climate change, trade, and transport. Invasive tree pests debilitate their host and disrupt forest ecosystems, thus it is imperative to quantitatively model and predict their spread. Addressing this, we represent the spatial distribution of the pest as a population density field which evolves according to a spatiotemporal reaction-diffusion equation. We solve this intractable system of equations n…

Soil runoff from logged forests releases more reactive carbon, undermining climate mitigation efforts #environment

Soil runoff from logged forests releases more reactive carbon, undermining climate mitigation efforts
The global demand for wood-based products is constantly increasing, creating a challenge for the logging industry. In an attempt to keep up in a sustainable manner, the industry replaces logged areas with tree farms and nurseries to eventually replenish supplies. This use and regrowth of wood has also been thought to help maintain a carbon sink. While this may be true to some extent, a new study has found that an important source of carbon loss is often being left out of the equation.

Here's my latest Human Meme podcast episode! Don't let the worms eat your brain!
https://humanmeme.com/three-hidden-discoveries-forests-control-weather-consciousness-stutters-and-worms-built-civilization

Ridges are my thing, 360 views...
(Ammergauer Alps, November 2024)
#FootpathFriday #LandscapePhotography #Alps

"Animals boost tropical forests' carbon absorption by aiding seed dispersal"
#Animals #Trees #Forests

Animals boost tropical forests' carbon absorption by aiding seed dispersal
A lot of attention has been paid to how climate change can drive biodiversity loss. Now, MIT researchers have shown that the reverse is also true: Reductions in biodiversity can jeopardize one of Earth's most powerful levers for mitigating climate change.

You Republican dumbasses…the way to fight these wildfires is to stop carbon emissions and return forests to Native management — both things you oppose.
https://mstdn.social/@carrieberry/114826160395295836

In some UK woodlands, every young tree has died. What’s going wrong? https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jul/10/britain-ancient-woodlands-failing-regenerate-forests-climate-drought-heat-dis…

Once again, the federal government released its annual State of Canada’s Forests report, and once again, it reads more like a promotional brochure for the logging industry than a comprehensive stock-taking assessment of what's happening in forests across Canada.
Instead of confronting the growing threats of forest fragmentation, the loss of old growth and primary forests and climate disruption, the report paints a rosy picture that downplays the real impacts of industrial logging o…

A Cycle Walk for Sampling Measures on Spanning Forests for Redistricting
Daryl R. DeFord, Gregory Herschlag, Jonathan C. Mattingly
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08629 https://

A Cycle Walk for Sampling Measures on Spanning Forests for Redistricting
We introduce a new Markov Chain called the Cycle Walk for sampling measures of graph partitions where the partition elements have roughly equal size. Such Markov Chains are of current interest in the generation and evaluation of political districts. We present numerical evidence that this chain can efficiently sample target distributions that have been difficult for existing sampling Markov chains.

🐀 Seed-dispersing animals are in decline, impacting forests and the climate: Study
https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2025/08/seed-dispersing-animals-are-in-decline-impacting-forests-and-the-climate-study/…

Seed-dispersing animals are in decline, impacting forests and the climate: Study
A lot of attention has been paid to the decrease in bee populations and other pollinators, but a recent review article makes the case that we should be equally alarmed by the declining numbers of seed-dispersing animals, which are crucial for growing healthy forests. “Both are important and should be taken into account in restoration […]

"Washington State Protects the Old-Growth Forests of Tomorrow, Creates 77,000 Acres of ‘Legacy Forests’"
#US #USA #America #Washington

Washington to Protect the Old-Growth Forests of Tomorrow, Creates 77,000 Acres of 'Legacy Forests'
The legacy forest announcement raises an interesting question for forest management and conservation to consider around the world over.

Out-of-sample gravity predictions and trade policy counterfactuals
Nicolas Apfel, Holger Breinlich, Nick Green, Dennis Novy, J. M. C. Santos Silva, Tom Zylkin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11271

Out-of-sample gravity predictions and trade policy counterfactuals
Gravity equations are often used to evaluate counterfactual trade policy scenarios, such as the effect of regional trade agreements on trade flows. In this paper, we argue that the suitability of gravity equations for this purpose crucially depends on their out-of-sample predictive power. We propose a methodology that compares different versions of the gravity equation, both among themselves and with machine learning-based forecast methods such as random forests and neural networks. We find tha…

Targeted tuning of random forests for quantile estimation and prediction intervals
Matthew Berkowitz, Rachel MacKay Altman, Thomas M. Loughin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.01430

Targeted tuning of random forests for quantile estimation and prediction intervals
We present a novel tuning procedure for random forests (RFs) that improves the accuracy of estimated quantiles and produces valid, relatively narrow prediction intervals. While RFs are typically used to estimate mean responses (conditional on covariates), they can also be used to estimate quantiles by estimating the full distribution of the response. However, standard approaches for building RFs often result in excessively biased quantile estimates. To reduce this bias, our proposed tuning proc…

On Sunday, for the first time in years, you can take the bus to hike in Oakland's redwood forests.
"Line 31 brings back long-forgotten service to Redwood Regional Park. By choosing to restore service, planners made the case that parks aren’t a luxury — they’re an integral part of our lives and an important part of AC Transit’s mission." - @…

🧽 Native forests sink more carbon than expected, inverse modeling reveals
(... when I first got into this circa 2000 we thought climax ecosystems were "net zero", we're learning that they keep capturing CO2)
https://phys.org/news/2025-06-native-fo…

Native forests sink more carbon than expected, inverse modeling reveals
A study has found New Zealand's native forests are absorbing more carbon dioxide (CO2) than previously thought. Study leader, NIWA atmospheric scientist Dr. Beata Bukosa says the findings could have implications for New Zealand's greenhouse gas reporting, carbon credit costs, and climate and land-use policies. The research was published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.

Climate-protecting carbon sinks of EU forests are declining #EU

Climate-protecting carbon sinks of EU forests are declining
Forests cover about 40% of the EU's land area. Between 1990 and 2022, they absorbed around 10% of the continent's man-made carbon emissions. However, the carbon dioxide absorption capacity of forests, also known as carbon sinks, is becoming increasingly weaker.

A hierarchical modelling approach for Bayesian Causal Forests on longitudinal data: A Case Study in Multiple Sclerosis Clinical Trials
Emma Prevot, Dieter A. H\"aring, Thomas E. Nichols, Chris C. Holmes, Habib Ganjgahi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08418

A hierarchical modelling approach for Bayesian Causal Forests on longitudinal data: A Case Study in Multiple Sclerosis Clinical Trials
Long-running clinical trials offer a unique opportunity to study disease progression and treatment response over time, enabling questions about how and when interventions alter patient trajectories. However, drawing causal conclusions in this setting is challenging due to irregular follow-up, individual-level heterogeneity, and time-varying confounding. Bayesian Additive Regression Trees (BART) and their extension, Bayesian Causal Forests (BCF), have proven powerful for flexible causal inferenc…

Boreal Afforestation's Underestimated Cloud Influence on Earth's Energy Imbalance
Enoch Ofosu, Kevin Bradley Dsouza, Daniel Chukwuemeka Amaogu, J\'er\^ome Pigeon, Richard Boudreault, Juan Moreno-Cruz, Pooneh Maghoul, Yuri Leonenko
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09295

Boreal Afforestation's Underestimated Cloud Influence on Earth's Energy Imbalance
Earth's Energy Imbalance (EEI) is accelerating, partly due to declining planetary albedo from reduced cloud cover. Boreal afforestation can either mitigate or exacerbate this trend through competing biophysical feedbacks. While snow masking reduces surface albedo (+0.5 to +2.5 $W/m^2$ warming), forests can enhance low-level cloud cover (0.1-0.5%) and increase cloud reflectivity via biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOCs), producing potential cooling (-1.8 to -6.7 $W/m^2$). This BVOC-aerosol…

"Will tropical dry forests survive the next 50 years?"
#Forests #Environment
https://

Will tropical dry forests survive the next 50 years?
In 1978, renowned ecologist Dan Janzen jumped into a ravine in Costa Rica, broke three ribs, and spent the first month of the rainy season watching the tropical dry forest from inside a shack. At night, a simple 25-watt bulb drew in so many moths that they plastered the walls like a live wallpaper. The […]

On lesson: "It's incredibly expensive to try to replace the services that the Earth's ecosystems provide for free to humanity."
https://bbc.com/future/article/20250703-how-the-biosphere-2-experiment-changed-our-u…

🍄 Fungi found on dying buckthorn could control the highly invasive species
#fungus

Fungi found on dying buckthorn could control the highly invasive species
University of Minnesota researchers are studying the use of fungi as a tool to control invasive buckthorn, a problematic species that crowds out native plants and persistently degrades forests in the Midwest and Northeast.

To see the forest for the trees: On the infinite divisibility of unlabeled forests
Michal Bassan, Serte Donderwinkel, Brett Kolesnik
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.16650

To see the forest for the trees: On the infinite divisibility of unlabeled forests
Inspired by Stufler's recent probabilistic proof of Otter's asymptotic number of unlabeled trees, we revisit work of Palmer and Schwenk, and study unlabeled forests from a probabilistic point of view. We show that the number of trees in a random forest converges, with all of its moments, to a shifted compound Poisson. We also find the asymptotic proportion of forests that are trees. The key fact is that the number of trees $t_n$ and forests $f_n$ are related by a Lévy process. As such, the res…

Replaced article(s) found for cs.LG. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.LG/new
[2/6]:
- Training Set Reconstruction from Differentially Private Forests: How Effective is DP?
Alice Gorg\'e, Julien Ferry, S\'ebastien Gambs, Thibaut Vidal

Flock: completed!
I haven't written about it for a while, but I had been playing Flock in small chunks since I started it back in December, until I reached a bit where I couldn't quite parse the instructions. Having identified and charmed the Emperor Cosmot and the Cloaked Rustic, the forests were unveiled and I explored, including the giant mushrooms of the Skyfish Caverns.

Long; central Massachusetts colonial history
Today on a whim I visited a site in Massachusetts marked as "Huguenot Fort Ruins" on OpenStreetMaps. I drove out with my 4-year-old through increasingly rural central Massachusetts forests & fields to end up on a narrow street near the top of a hill beside a small field. The neighboring houses had huge lawns, some with tractors.
Appropriately for this day and this moment in history, the history of the site turns out to be a microcosm of America. Across the field beyond a cross-shaped stone memorial stood an info board with a few diagrams and some text. The text of the main sign (including typos/misspellings) read:
"""
Town Is Formed
Early in the 1680's, interest began to generate to develop a town in the area west of Natick in the south central part of the Commonwealth that would be suitable for a settlement. A Mr. Hugh Campbell, a Scotch merchant of Boston petitioned the court for land for a colony. At about the same time, Joseph Dudley and William Stoughton also were desirous of obtaining land for a settlement. A claim was made for all lands west of the Blackstone River to the southern land of Massachusetts to a point northerly of the Springfield Road then running southwesterly until it joined the southern line of Massachusetts.
Associated with Dudley and Stoughton was Robert Thompson of London, England, Dr. Daniel Cox and John Blackwell, both of London and Thomas Freak of Hannington, Wiltshire, as proprietors. A stipulation in the acquisition of this land being that within four years thirty families and an orthodox minister settle in the area. An extension of this stipulation was granted at the end of the four years when no group large enough seemed to be willing to take up the opportunity.
In 1686, Robert Thompson met Gabriel Bernor and learned that he was seeking an area where his countrymen, who had fled their native France because of the Edict of Nantes, were desirous of a place to live. Their main concern was to settle in a place that would allow them freedom of worship. New Oxford, as it was the so-named, at that time included the larger part of Charlton, one-fourth of Auburn, one-fifth of Dudley and several square miles of the northeast portion of Southbridge as well as the easterly ares now known as Webster.
Joseph Dudley's assessment that the area was capable of a good settlement probably was based on the idea of the meadows already established along with the plains, ponds, brooks and rivers. Meadows were a necessity as they provided hay for animal feed and other uses by the settlers. The French River tributary books and streams provided a good source for fishing and hunting. There were open areas on the plains as customarily in November of each year, the Indians burnt over areas to keep them free of underwood and brush. It appeared then that this area was ready for settling.
The first seventy-five years of the settling of the Town of Oxford originally known as Manchaug, embraced three different cultures. The Indians were known to be here about 1656 when the Missionary, John Eliott and his partner Daniel Gookin visited in the praying towns. Thirty years later, in 1686, the Huguenots walked here from Boston under the guidance of their leader Isaac Bertrand DuTuffeau. The Huguenot's that arrived were not peasants, but were acknowledged to be the best Agriculturist, Wine Growers, Merchant's, and Manufacter's in France. There were 30 families consisting of 52 people. At the time of their first departure (10 years), due to Indian insurrection, there were 80 people in the group, and near their Meetinghouse/Church was a Cemetery that held 20 bodies. In 1699, 8 to 10 familie's made a second attempt to re-settle, failing after only four years, with the village being completely abandoned in 1704.
The English colonist made their way here in 1713 and established what has become a permanent settlement.
"""
All that was left of the fort was a crumbling stone wall that would have been the base of a higher wooden wall according to a picture of a model (I didn't think to get a shot of that myself). Only trees and brush remain where the multi-story main wooden building was.
This story has so many echoes in the present:
- The rich colonialists from Boston & London agree to settle the land, buying/taking land "rights" from the colonial British court that claimed jurisdiction without actually having control of the land. Whether the sponsors ever actually visited the land themselves I don't know. They surely profited somehow, whether from selling on the land rights later or collecting taxes/rent or whatever, by they needed poor laborers to actually do the work of developing the land (& driving out the original inhabitants, who had no say in the machinations of the Boston court).
- The land deal was on condition that there capital-holders who stood to profit would find settlers to actually do the work of colonizing. The British crown wanted more territory to be controlled in practice not just in theory, but they weren't going to be the ones to do the hard work.
- The capital-holders actually failed to find enough poor suckers to do their dirty work for 4 years, until the Huguenots, fleeing religious persecution in France, were desperate enough to accept their terms.
- Of course, the land was only so ripe for settlement because of careful tending over centuries by the natives who were eventually driven off, and whose land management practices are abandoned today. Given the mention of praying towns (& dates), this was after King Phillip's war, which resulted in at least some forced resettlement of native tribes around the area, but the descendants of those "Indians" mentioned in this sign are still around. For example, this is the site of one local band of Nipmuck, whose namesake lake is about 5 miles south of the fort site: #LandBack.

Comparison of Path Planning Algorithms for Autonomous Vehicle Navigation Using Satellite and Airborne LiDAR Data
Chang Liu, Zhexiong Xue, Tamas Sziranyi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.05884

Comparison of Path Planning Algorithms for Autonomous Vehicle Navigation Using Satellite and Airborne LiDAR Data
Autonomous vehicle navigation in unstructured environments, such as forests and mountainous regions, presents significant challenges due to irregular terrain and complex road conditions. This work provides a comparative evaluation of mainstream and well-established path planning algorithms applied to weighted pixel-level road networks derived from high-resolution satellite imagery and airborne LiDAR data. For 2D road-map navigation, where the weights reflect road conditions and terrain difficul…

A century ago, the government hired unemployed young men to build America's forests, trails, and parks. Photos show FDR's 'tree army.' - Business Insider
https://www.businessinsider.com/civilian-conservation-corps-ccc-fdr-parks-forests-photos

How Trees on Atoms of Subset Algebras Define Minimal Forests and Their Growth
Vasily Buslov
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.17921 https://…

How Trees on Atoms of Subset Algebras Define Minimal Forests and Their Growth
A complete description is given of how minimal trees on atoms of the algebra of subsets $\mathfrak{A}_k$ generated by minimal spanning $k$-component forests of a weighted digraph $V$ determine the form of these forests and how forests grow with increasing number of arcs (that is with a decrease in the number of trees). Precise bounds are established on what can be extracted about the tree structure of the original graph if the minimal trees on the atoms of a single algebra $\mathfrak{A}_k$ are …

🤔 Who is clearing Indonesia’s forests — and why?
#indonesia

Who is clearing Indonesia’s forests — and why?
JAKARTA — While most tropical countries experienced record-high deforestation rates in 2024, Indonesia’s forest loss is slowing, bucking a global trend. But beneath the headline figures lies a troubling mystery: Nearly half of the forest cleared last year can’t be linked to any identifiable driver, raising red flags about speculative land clearing, regulatory blind spots […]

"While crop seed vaults are common around the world, nurseries for wild and native plants are rare, and many plant species quietly become extinct. This marks #Gurukula out as a Noah’s ark for endangered plant species."

Moerdijk Hopf algebras of decorated rooted forests: an operated algebra approach
Loic Foissy, Xiao-Song Peng, Yunzhou Xie, Yi Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18658 https://

Moerdijk Hopf algebras of decorated rooted forests: an operated algebra approach
In this paper, we first endow the space of decorated planar rooted forests with a coproduct that equips it with the structure of a bialgebra and further a Moerdijk Hopf algebra. We also present a combinatorial description of this coproduct, and further give an explicit formulation of its dual coproducts through the newly defined notion of forest-representable matrices. By viewing the Moerdijk Hopf algebra within the framework of operated algebras, we introduce the notion of a multiple cocycle H…

And a quick clip from today's walk as well. The clips from the woods are a bit ... unsatisfying (they seem to be unsharp / overcompressed). Maybe I have to change some settings or it's just not good for clips in darker forests.
https://video.franzgraf.de/w/9S7mkgereJmaoH5m4vVHse

Brazil: Protect the mangroves and tropical forests of Tauš-Mirim! https://www.rainforest-rescue.org/petitions/1305/brazil-protect-the-mangroves-and-tropical-forests-of-taua-mirim

#petition Brazil: Protect the mangroves and tropical forests of Tauá-Mirim!
The people of the Tauá-Mirim region in the Amazon are urgently calling on the Brazilian government to protect their land. The rivers, mangroves and tropical forests south of São Luís in the state of Maranhão are threatened by infrastructure, industrial, and agricultural projects. Please support our petition.

"Giant Corporations Protect 15,000 Square Miles of Forests in Partnership With WWF Stewardship Program"
#Trees #Nature #Environment

Giant Corporations Protect 15,000 Square Miles of Forests in Partnership With WWF Stewardship Program
The WWF Forests Forward program has partnered with 26 big businesses to reduce deforestation and they've conserved 15 million sq-miles.

🔊 #NowPlaying on #BBCRadio3:
#BBCProms
- 2025
Live at the BBC Proms the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Thomas Adès performs Sibelius, Adès & Gabriella Smith's organ concerto Breathing Forests with soloist James McVinnie.
Relisten now 👇
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002hn07

On the Parallel Complexity of Finding a Matroid Basis
Sanjeev Khanna, Aaron Putterman, Junkai Song
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.08194 https://

On the Parallel Complexity of Finding a Matroid Basis
A fundamental question in parallel computation, posed by Karp, Upfal, and Wigderson (FOCS 1985, JCSS 1988), asks: \emph{given only independence-oracle access to a matroid on $n$ elements, how many rounds are required to find a basis using only polynomially many queries?} This question generalizes, among others, the complexity of finding bases of linear spaces, partition matroids, and spanning forests in graphs. In their work, they established an upper bound of $O(\sqrt{n})$ rounds and a lower b…

Global warming is altering storms lightning, impacting tropical forests https://news.mongabay.com/2025/07/global-warming-is-altering-storms-lightning-impacting-tropical-forests/

Global warming is altering storms lightning, impacting tropical forests
A climate change-induced surge in brief but intense thunderstorms poses a growing but underrecognized threat to trees in tropical forests, a finding that could have major implications for carbon storage and tropical biodiversity under future global warming scenarios. That’s according to a recently published paper, which determines that short-lived but powerful convective storms — combining […]

🪤 Young forests could help to capture carbon in climate change fight
(... leave old forests alone, leave young forests alone!)
https://phys.org/news/2025-07-young-forests-capture-carbon-climate.html

Young forests could help to capture carbon in climate change fight
Young forests regrowing from land where mature woodlands have been cut down have a key role to play in removing billions of tons of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) and combating climate change, a new study reveals.

Trump Administration To End Protections for 58 Million Acres of National Forests | Portside
https://portside.org/2025-06-23/trump-administration-end-protections-58-million-acres-national-forests

Not a word about WHY he’s paving it over. He just is. https://fediscience.org/@petergleick/114729442831614255

Measurements and Modeling of Air-Ground Integrated Channel in Forest Environment Based on OFDM Signals
Zhe Xiao, Shu Sun, Na Liu, Lianming Xu, Li Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.02303

Measurements and Modeling of Air-Ground Integrated Channel in Forest Environment Based on OFDM Signals
Forests are frequently impacted by climate conditions, vegetation density, and intricate terrain and geology, which contribute to natural disasters. Personnel engaged in or supporting rescue operations in such environments rely on robust communication systems to ensure their safety, highlighting the criticality of channel measurements in forest environments. However, according to current research, there is limited research on channel detection and modeling in forest areas in the existing litera…

Camera trap videos of wildlife in Guanacaste, Costa Rica from a project with Fondo de Biodiversidad Sostenible (FBS). FBS protects forests on private farms in Costa Rica
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-GrK3OIfh8

Animals boost tropical forests' carbon absorption by aiding seed dispersal #environment

Animals boost tropical forests' carbon absorption by aiding seed dispersal
A lot of attention has been paid to how climate change can drive biodiversity loss. Now, MIT researchers have shown that the reverse is also true: Reductions in biodiversity can jeopardize one of Earth's most powerful levers for mitigating climate change.

Missing value imputation with adversarial random forests -- MissARF
Pegah Golchian, Jan Kapar, David S. Watson, Marvin N. Wright
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.15681

Missing value imputation with adversarial random forests -- MissARF
Handling missing values is a common challenge in biostatistical analyses, typically addressed by imputation methods. We propose a novel, fast, and easy-to-use imputation method called missing value imputation with adversarial random forests (MissARF), based on generative machine learning, that provides both single and multiple imputation. MissARF employs adversarial random forest (ARF) for density estimation and data synthesis. To impute a missing value of an observation, we condition on the no…

#Poetry
Fear, by Kahlil Gibran
It is said that before entering the sea
a river trembles with fear.
She looks back at the path she has traveled,
from the peaks of the mountains,
the long winding road crossing forests and villages.
And in front of her,
she sees an ocean so vast,
that to enter
there seems nothing more than to disappear forever.
But …

"Global wetlands conference results in resolutions for protection & restoration"
#Wetlands #Environment

Global wetlands conference results in resolutions for restoration & protection
Wetlands are disappearing at three times the rate of forests, alarming conservationists who highlight the ecosystems’ role in achieving global biodiversity and climate goals. To address these challenges and chart a path toward sustainable conservation, delegates gathered in Zimbabwe for the 15th Meeting of the Conference of the Contracting Parties (COP15) on Wetlands in July. […]

A Specialized Simplex Algorithm for Budget-Constrained Total Variation-Regularized Problems
Dominic Yang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13493 https://

A Specialized Simplex Algorithm for Budget-Constrained Total Variation-Regularized Problems
We consider a class of linear programs on graphs with total variation regularization and a budgetary constraint. For these programs, we give a characterization of basic solutions in terms of rooted spanning forests with orientation on the underlying graph. This leads to an interpretation of the simplex method in terms of simple graph operations on these underlying forests. We exploit this structure to produce an accelerated simplex method and empirically show that such improvements can lead to …

Optimal structure learning and conditional independence testing
Ming Gao, Yuhao Wang, Bryon Aragam
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.05689 https://

Optimal structure learning and conditional independence testing
We establish a fundamental connection between optimal structure learning and optimal conditional independence testing by showing that the minimax optimal rate for structure learning problems is determined by the minimax rate for conditional independence testing in these problems. This is accomplished by establishing a general reduction between these two problems in the case of poly-forests, and demonstrated by deriving optimal rates for several examples, including Bernoulli, Gaussian and nonpar…

🌰 Offsetting fossil fuel reserves by planting trees is not a viable strategy, analysis finds
https://phys.org/news/2025-06-offsetting-fossil-fuel-reserves-trees.html

Offsetting fossil fuel reserves by planting trees is not a viable strategy, analysis finds
New forests larger than the land area of North America would need to be planted to offset the potential carbon dioxide emissions from the fossil fuel reserves currently held by the world's 200 largest fossil fuel companies.

Chabauty Limits of Fermat Spirals
Yohay Ailon Tevet
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.22863 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.22863

Chabauty Limits of Fermat Spirals
A Fermat spiral is a set of points of the form $\sqrt{n}e^{2πiαn}$ for $α\in \mathbb{R}$. In this paper we prove that the Chabauty limits of Fermat spirals are always closed subgroups of $\mathbb{R}^2$, and conclude that no Fermat spirals are dense forests. Furthermore, we show that if $α$ is badly approximable the Chabauty limits are always lattices, for which we give a characterisation.

Sonnet 104 - CIV
To me, fair friend, you never can be old,
For as you were when first your eye I ey'd,
Such seems your beauty still. Three winters cold,
Have from the forests shook three summers' pride,
Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turn'd,
In process of the seasons have I seen,
Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burn'd,
Since first I saw you fresh, which yet are green.
Ah! yet doth beauty like a dial-hand,…

This is another horrifying statistic to shelve alongside the composition of global mammalian biomass:
• humans 34%
• livestock and pets 62%
• wild animals 4%
#science #biology #ecology

Jonathan Schofield (@urlyman@mastodon.social)
Attached: 1 image …Here are some highlights (lowlights): “If you drop all that old life into the container that we call Earth, and burn them, it turns out that what we burn in *1 year* weighs 100x more than everything alive today. Everything. All the whales, elephants, forests, insects, grass, crops, birds, fish, people, dogs and cats. Add up all the carbon in everything alive now, and still, in one year we burn a hundred times more.” #climateDiary

Discovery of Fatigue Strength Models via Feature Engineering and automated eXplainable Machine Learning applied to the welded Transverse Stiffener
Michael A. Kraus, Helen Bartsch
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.02005

Discovery of Fatigue Strength Models via Feature Engineering and automated eXplainable Machine Learning applied to the welded Transverse Stiffener
This research introduces a unified approach combining Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) with Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) to predict fatigue strength in welded transverse stiffener details. It integrates expert-driven feature engineering with algorithmic feature creation to enhance accuracy and explainability. Based on the extensive fatigue test database regression models - gradient boosting, random forests, and neural networks - were trained using AutoML under three feature sc…

Heat-stressed Australian forests are thinning fast, producing carbon emissions #Australia

Heat-stressed Australian forests are thinning fast, producing carbon emissions
Heat-stressed Victorian mountain ash forests are thinning fast, turning from carbon sinks to carbon sources, new research reveals.

Horseshoe Forests for High-Dimensional Causal Survival Analysis
Tijn Jacobs, Wessel N. van Wieringen, St\'ephanie L. van der Pas
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.22004 https://

Horseshoe Forests for High-Dimensional Causal Survival Analysis
We develop a Bayesian tree ensemble model to estimate heterogeneous treatment effects in censored survival data with high-dimensional covariates. Instead of imposing sparsity through the tree structure, we place a horseshoe prior directly on the step heights to achieve adaptive global-local shrinkage. This strategy allows flexible regularisation and reduces noise. We develop a reversible jump Gibbs sampler to accommodate the non-conjugate horseshoe prior within the tree ensemble framework. We s…

💩 Nitrogen in forests and grasslands overestimated, new global analysis shows
https://phys.org/news/2025-07-nitrogen-forests-grasslands-overestimated-global.html

Nitrogen in forests and grasslands overestimated, new global analysis shows
Forests, grasslands, and other natural areas around the world have access to about a quarter less nitrogen than previously estimated, according to a new study published in Nature.

Industry managed forests more likely to fuel megafires, study finds #environment

Industry managed forests more likely to fuel megafires, study finds
The odds of high-severity wildfire were nearly one-and-a-half times higher on industrial private land than on publicly owned forests, a new study found. Forests managed by timber companies were more likely to exhibit the conditions that megafires love—dense stands of regularly spaced trees with continuous vegetation connecting the understory to the canopy.

Alpine County, perched like an emerald on the crest of the Sierra Nevada, is as rural as rural California gets.
Vast distance separates its sparse settlements, tucked among forests and crystalline streams. The views, unobstructed by city clutter, go on forever.
There is no hospital,
no supermarket, fast-food restaurant or shopping mall anywhere in its 743 square miles.
The only stoplight is temporary,
put in place for a bridge repair.
And yet if all goes …

California mystery: Why does a small rural county vote like SF?
Rural usually means Republican. But this county is a Democratic speck in California's sea of red.

Spectrum Estimation through Kirchhoff Random Forests
Simon Barthelm\'e, Fabienne Castell, Alexandre Gaudilli\`ere, Clothilde M\'elot, Matteo Quattropani, Nicolas Tremblay
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.19164

Spectrum Estimation through Kirchhoff Random Forests
Given a non-oriented edge-weighted graph, we show how to make some estimation of the associated Laplacian eigenvalues through Monte Carlo evaluation of spectral quantities computed along Kirchhoff random rooted spanning forest trajectories. The sampling cost of this estimation is only linear in the node number, up to a logarithmic factor. By associating a double cover of such a graph with any symmetric real matrix, we can then perform spectral estimation in the same way for the latter.

Climate Change Is Making Fire Weather Worse for World’s Forests #environment

Climate Change Is Making Fire Weather Worse for World’s Forests
Forest fires are on the rise globally. An increase in severe fire weather is largely responsible.

Stunning satellite views show forests like never before, highlighting the potential of the new Biomass Mission. #climatechange #climatesolutions #climate

On Tur\'{a}n problems for Berge forests
Junpeng Zhou, D\'aniel Gerbner, Xiying Yuan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.16140 https://…

On Turán problems for Berge forests
For a graph $F$, an $r$-uniform hypergraph $H$ is a Berge-$F$ if there is a bijection $ϕ:E(F)\rightarrow E(H)$ such that $e\subseteq ϕ(e)$ for each $e\in E(F)$. Given a family $\mathcal{F}$ of $r$-uniform hypergraphs, an $r$-uniform hypergraph is $\mathcal{F}$-free if it does not contain any member in $\mathcal{F}$ as a subhypergraph. The Turán number of $\mathcal{F}$ is the maximum number of hyperedges in an $\mathcal{F}$-free $r$-uniform hypergraph on $n$ vertices. In this paper, some exac…

Making my way back to the base camp after Forest Frolic 2025 in the James Kennedy State Forest through a mostly flat and ferny forest
#photo #photography #forests

Lya2pcf: an efficient pipeline to estimate two- and three-point correlation functions of the Lyman-$\alpha$ forest
Josue De-Santiago, Rafael Guti\'errez-Balboa, Gustavo Niz, Alma X. Gonz\'alez-Morales
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.00129

Lya2pcf: an efficient pipeline to estimate two- and three-point correlation functions of the Lyman-$α$ forest
Studying the matter distribution in the universe through the Lyman-$α$ forest allows us to constrain small-scale physics in the high-redshift regime. Spectroscopic quasar surveys are generating increasingly large datasets that require efficient algorithms to compute correlation functions. Moreover, cosmological analyses based on Lyman-$α$ forests can significantly benefit from incorporating higher-order statistics alongside traditional two-point correlations. In this work, we present Lya2pcf,…

"Report links world’s top banks to social & environmental harms from mining"
#Banks #Finance #Environment

Report links world’s top banks to social & environmental harms from mining
A new Forests and Finance Coalition report finds top financial institutions, including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and BlackRock, support mining companies linked to deforestation, land-grabs, contamination and Indigenous rights violations. According to the report, from 2016-24, major banks provided $493 billion in loans and underwriting to mining companies, including Glencore, Rio Tinto and Vale. […]

Random walk reflected off of infinity, with applications to uniform spanning forests and supercritical Liouville quantum gravity
Ewain Gwynne, Jinwoo Sung
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.18827

Random walk reflected off of infinity, with applications to uniform spanning forests and supercritical Liouville quantum gravity
Let $\mathcal G$ be an infinite graph -- not necessarily one-ended -- on which the simple random walk is transient. We define a variant of the continuous-time random walk on $\mathcal G$ which reaches $\infty$ in finite time and "reflects off of $\infty$" infinitely many times. We show that the Aldous-Broder algorithm for the random walk reflected off of $\infty$ gives the free uniform spanning forest (FUSF) on $\mathcal G$. Furthermore, Wilson's algorithm for the random walk reflected off of…

Fundamental and homogeneous bases of Hopf algebras built from nonsymmetric operads
Samuele Giraudo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.02165 https://

Fundamental and homogeneous bases of Hopf algebras built from nonsymmetric operads
We introduce new partial order structures on the underlying sets of free nonsymmetric operads. These posets involve decorated ordered rooted trees, and their terminal intervals are lattices. These lattices are not graded, not self-dual, and not semi-distributive, but they are EL-shellable, and their Mbius functions take values in $\{-1, 0, 1\}$. They admit sublattices on the families of $m$-Fuss-Catalan objects and of forests of trees. This latter order structure is used to construct two new ba…

💵 It’s time to pay the true value of tropical forest conservation (commentary)
https://news.mongabay.com/2025/06/its-time-to-pay-the-true-value-of-tropical-forest-conservation-commentary/

It’s time to pay the true value of tropical forest conservation (commentary)
Tropical forests help regulate the global climate, host irreplaceable biodiversity and provide fresh water resources. Plus forests in general are the source of livelihoods for more than a billion people — so our very existence depends on them. However, because their value is not reflected in markets, these areas are often converted to other uses. Conserving our tropical forests […]

"Trees alone won’t save us: new study says forestation has less potential to fix the climate than hoped"
#Trees #Environment #Climate

Trees alone won’t save us: new study says forestation has less potential to fix the climate than hoped
Governments have pledged vast areas for new forests, but much of this land may be unsuitable.

🔥 Deforestation is killing people by raising local temperatures
https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2025/08/deforestation-is-killing-people-by-raising-local-temperatures/

Deforestation is killing people by raising local temperatures
For decades, the case for saving tropical forests has been cast in terms of carbon. Trees sequester vast quantities of it; razing them pumps more into the air. But new research reminds us that the destruction of rainforests has consequences that arrive long before the carbon accounting is tallied: It makes people hotter, sometimes lethally […]

"Bangladesh plans new reserve for trapped elephants"
#Bangladesh #Elephants #Animals

Bangladesh plans new reserve for trapped elephants
Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries. Bangladesh is preparing to add to its tally of 56 protected areas by declaring a new sanctuary in its northeast — not for forests or tigers, but for a group of elephants trapped by geopolitics, reports Mongabay’s Abu […]

Report links world’s top banks to social & environmental harms from mining https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2025/09/report-links-worlds-top-banks-to-social-environmental-harms-from-mining/

Report links world’s top banks to social & environmental harms from mining
A new Forests and Finance Coalition report finds top financial institutions, including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and BlackRock, support mining companies linked to deforestation, land-grabs, contamination and Indigenous rights violations. According to the report, from 2016-24, major banks provided $493 billion in loans and underwriting to mining companies, including Glencore, Rio Tinto and Vale. […]

"Of mushrooms and mycelium: How fungi are powering eco-friendly solutions"
#Mushrooms #Fungi

Of mushrooms and mycelium: How fungi are powering eco-friendly solutions
Often hidden from view, fungi are a critical part of our ecosystems. Some can be eaten as mushrooms; others help trees and forests thrive. But that’s not all: they’re also helping us create low-cost, sustainable housing materials and additional income for farmers, says Gabriela D’Elia, director of the Fungal Diversity Survey and a fungi enthusiast, […]

🌲 A Sequoia Forest Grows in Detroit
#detroit

A Sequoia Forest Grows in Detroit
Using the DNA of the world’s mightiest trees, a tree grower in Michigan aims to replenish old-growth forests, one sapling at a time.

"Singapore’s regreening is a model for cities everywhere"
#Singapore #Environment
https://

Singapore’s regreening is a model for cities everywhere
Singapore has come a long way since the 1880s, when only roughly 7% of its native forests remained. Since the 1960s, when the city-state gained independence, it has implemented a number of urban regreening initiatives, and today, nearly 47% of the city is considered green space, providing numerous benefits to human residents and wildlife, like […]

World Rainforest Day and the state of Earth’s most vital rainforests https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2025/06/world-rainforest-day-and-the-state-of-earths-most-vital-rainforests/

World Rainforest Day and the state of Earth’s most vital rainforests
June 22 marks World Rainforest Day, launched in 2017 by Rainforest Partnership to highlight the critical role of tropical forests. These ecosystems stabilize the climate, regulate rainfall, store vast amounts of carbon, and support most of the world’s terrestrial biodiversity. Yet despite their importance, 2024 proved to be a devastating year. Fires ravaged millions of […]

"Nepal sees positive outcome from reforestation project using local knowledge"
#Nepal #Trees #nature #Environment

Nepal sees positive outcome from reforestation project using local knowledge
KATHMANDU — A decade ago, people from Salija village in western Nepal traveled several hours into the uphill forests to gather firewood and feed for their livestock, Shakhamani Khorja recalls. “[Now], we have a forest growing on about 13 hectares [32 acres] of land less than a kilometer [0.6 miles] away that helps meet our […]

🧑‍🚒 California wood pellet plants canceled amid market decline & public pushback
https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2025/07/california-wood-pellet-plants-canceled-amid-market-decline-public-pushback/

California wood pellet plants canceled amid market decline & public pushback
Golden State Natural Resources (GSNR), a California nonprofit that focuses on rural economic development, has canceled plans to build two industrial-scale wood pellet plants in the state. The organization cited weakening market conditions and pushback from locals as the drivers of their decision. Conservation groups are hailing the move as a win for forests and […]

Walking back through the ferns after the Forest Frolic in James Kennedy State Forest
#ferns #plants #forests #forestfrolic