Trees a crowd

This last few weeks has seen a few news stories related to trees.

Image: Alan Parkinson, and shared under CC license

The first was a research project which showed that trees were arriving in the tundra much sooner than anticipated.

The second was about the false autumn that trees have experienced, which means they are losing their leaves prematurely.

This book explores the changes that are taking place in the world's forests. 

They are sending us a warning.

The link above is to an extract from Ben Rawlence's book when it was Book of the Week on Radio 4.

The trees are on the move. They shouldn't be. More than the Amazon rainforest, the northern boreal is truly the lung of the world. Covering one fifth of the globe and containing one third of all the trees on earth, it has been foundational to our climate for the last few million years. 

But now the northern forest is marching towards to the North Pole, turning the white Arctic green. And scientists are only just beginning to understand what this might mean for life on earth. In Scotland, Scandinavia, Siberia, Canada and Greenland, Rawlence discovers what the trees and the people who live and work alongside them have to tell us about the past, present and future of our planet. At the treeline he sees the devastating and accelerating impact of climate change, but also some reasons for hope.

And a few days ago a near neighbour chopped down a large tree and thinned out others which had been shielding some construction work and new houses being built. Not ideal...

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