Biodiversity

With its second annual conference upcoming, the ambitious African Forest Landscape Initiative has already begun to change the face of land use in Africa By Gabrielle Lipton This article is a part of the Global Landscapes Forum coverage of the AFR100 Second Annual Partnership Meeting in Niamey, Niger, 26-28 September.  Imagine having a string tied […]

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How trees may be a first defense in the battle against disaster By Douglas Sheil, originally posted on Forests News The 12-year absence of major hurricane landfalls in the continental USA ended earlier this year: Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Irma… perhaps the list and the destruction will continue. But what does this have to do with forests? As […]

The earth is crispy around here. Crunch, crunch, crunch—my every footstep made a crackling sound like a rustling bag of potato chips. Underneath the crunchy stuff was something almost fluffy. “It is the dried peat,” Nizar told me. He’s been working in this area for decades, acrobatically transitioning between the local community, government and private […]

How old is old growth in Borneo? 130 million years. Almost 80 percent of the island of Borneo was covered with this old growth rainforest in 1973. Today, only 28 percent remains. Barely bigger than France, Borneo’s rainforests are packed with more rare and fascinating species than almost anywhere else in the world. However, Borneo […]

“This is the perfect land—flat, fertile—all we need to do is drain it,” a farmer thinks upon approaching a peat forest. Draining the area turns waterlogged, carbon-rich soil into arable land, but in the process releases tons of carbon into the atmosphere. Only 15% of peatlands worldwide have been drained, but this alone is responsible […]