Outdoors & Nature

The report said five sectors “intimately connected to the climate crisis” have been linked to the highest number of attacks. A total of 1,681 attacks were attributed to the mining sector, followed by 1,154 from agribusiness, 792 from fossil fuels, 454 from renewable energy, and 359 from logging.

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The European Union’s landmark anti-deforestation law could fail to deliver on its environmental promises if enforcement authorities disproportionately focus on small importers while missing less obvious violations from major commodity firms, according to a new analysis by U.K.-based investigative nonprofit, Earthsight.

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Significance

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I didn't know what this was when I first found it but I thought that it had mycoheterotroph vibes and snapped a photo. iNat confirmed it as Corallorhiza striata. I should have waited a couple days for the flowers to open. Very neat, I will be on the look out for more next season.

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archived (Wayback Machine): - Mongabay article - report cited

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WASHINGTON COURT HOUSE, Ohio (AP) — Stubborn drought in Ohio and the shifting weather patterns influenced by climate change appear to be affecting North America’s largest native fruit: the pawpaw.

I was clearly fishing for Bass but pleasantly surprised

The president’s push to expand timber and fossil fuel production “is a double whammy on the climate.”

Crop insurance is a lifeline for farmers. But research shows it's not ready for climate change.

Not exactly traditional foraging but I have a lot of these that grow without care in untended parts of my garden and I’ve heard they are edible. The tubers are decent size for something that isn’t a crop and I could harvest a good number pretty easily if I wanted.

In the Cerrado — the largest and most plant-diverse savanna in the world — scientists have discovered that just 30 tree species account for almost half of the ecosystem’s trees.

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You’re helping nature — but nature also has ways to help you, make you more resilient, and relieve the stress caused by environmental destruction.

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The Brazilian government blocked 545 rural properties in the Amazonian state of Pará from selling crops and livestock both domestically and internationally, citing illegal deforestation, according to a May 6 announcement by the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change.

Well... it's a start.

A new Human Rights Watch report alleges abuse and human rights violations in an Indigenous community in Malaysia’s Sarawak state. The report finds Malaysian timber company Zedtee Sdn Bhd (Zedtee) destroyed culturally valuable forests without the consent of Indigenous people, who are facing an eviction notice from their land.

The destruction of the forest is recorded with forensic precision.

Just a few years ago, the Sahel region at the northern edge of Senegal was a "barren wasteland" where nothing had grown for 40 years. But the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) and local villagers teamed up to regreen the area, bringing back agriculture, improving the economy of the people who live there, and preventing the climate migration that desertification ultimately leads to.

In a recently published study, researchers offer a new tool to compare how different crops affect the environment in different regions.

Usually show up in the garden a couple weeks before they do in the woods.

Know the climate requirements of your fruits! Know the impact of future climate change on your region! The trees that you plant today will need to endure the climate conditions decades from now.

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Daniel Graham and Adam Carruthers were convicted of causing more than £620,000 worth of damage to the tree and more than £1,000 worth of damage to Hadrian's Wall in Northumberland.

In Morovis, a town in the center of Puerto Rico’s main island, lies the Las Cabachuelas nature reserve, a green labyrinth of approximately 1,950 acres. This place — known for its numerous caves — holds pre-colonial stories, rock art and petroglyphs, plants studied by paleobotanists, unique Caribbean fauna, and many other stories of what life was like in Puerto Rico before Spanish colonization and subsequent industrialization.

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Note that future warming is likely to be up to 50% greater than stated in this article.

I have Ostrich fern on the front of my house that I have been waiting years to try. I keep missing the window when they are ready so I was overjoyed when I saw my fiddlehead popping up. I chopped 9, steamed with in a pan with a little butter for 5 minutes. I plated them with just a sprinkle of flaky salt and had them for lunch today.

"Estimates suggest that more than 90% of tropical deforestation continues to be driven by agriculture" and yet this article fails to mention the cow in the room...

I started out as a hobby mycologist but I live in Canada and mushrooms can be in short supply during the winter. I took up amateur lichenology to fill the void but I quickly became consumed by them, there was so much I didn't know and the uncharted-territory aspect of it took hold of me. Now I photograph way more lichens than mushrooms and I've started to do a bit of public speaking for my mycology group on lichens and their ecology. I am just an amateur though so I'm not an expert by any means. Pic: Stereocaulon sp. The link is below.

Conservation orchards, or living collections, for fruit trees serve as a means to preserve genetic diversity while making it available in case of emergencies to preempt threats associated with global changes. Unlike seed banks, these collections provide immediate access to the necessary materials (pollen and flowers) for crossbreeding in varietal improvement programmes, as well as for reforestation and the conservation of wild relatives in forests. These conservation orchards also serve as open-air laboratories to study the response of fruit trees to climate conditions and parasite attacks, as well as the evolutionary and ecological processes that give rise to biodiversity.

A newly published study has found that nearly 75% of bird species in North America are sharply declining across their ranges, and eight in 10 plummeting in the very areas where they’re thought to be thriving and plentiful. Nearly every species, 97%, had gains and losses in their populations depending on the location, the study found.

As the world warms, driving sea levels higher, saltwater is encroaching along the world’s coasts and into its estuaries. The seawater invasion can overtake the freshwater that gives life to deciduous trees

A justice on the Brazilian Supreme Court has directed the government to seize private lands where forests have been illegally razed.

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(To be clear, they intend to cut down the rainforest and plant 3 million hectares of grass.)

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In Brazil, the Jequitinhonha Valley, where the four Maxakali territories are located, has suffered a dramatic rise in temperatures in recent years. Twenty Brazilian cities registered temperatures five degrees Celsius (nine degrees Fahrenheit) higher than the average daily maximum. The city of Araçua even shattered the record for the hottest temperature in Brazil’s history in November of that year. More than 85 percent of the Atlantic Forest has been destroyed. In Minas Gerais, experts estimate, less than eight percent remains. Brazil's dictatorship set the stage for even greater destruction of the region's tropical forests. In less than nine months, 24,475 wildfires were tallied — far exceeding the previous record high in the whole of 2021. Grass fires can spread four times as quickly as forest fires, leading the Maxakali to nickname the invasive plant “kerosene”. Some experts consider the Atlantic Forest to be regionally extinct. Singing organises life in Maxakali villages: music is used to cure illness, teach history or transmit practical instructions. Twelve musical canons, distinct in grammar and lexicon, total about 360 hours of song. Contained in the lyrics are hundreds of species of flora and fauna now extinct in the territory. Nursery caretakers sing to seeds as they are buried. The song lyrics help participants remember the ecological knowledge of their ancestors. Since its inception in 2023, the Hmhi project has planted over 60 hectares (148 acres) of fruit trees and 383 acres of Atlantic Forest vegetation. Programme participants have organised themselves into a provisional fire brigade.

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Brazilian prosecutors are calling for the cancellation of the largest carbon credit deal in the Amazon Rainforest, saying it breaks national law and risks harming Indigenous communities. The 1 billion real ($175 million) contract, signed last year by the state of Pará, promises to sell up to 12 million metric tons of forest-based carbon credits to the LEAF Coalition, comprised of the U.S., U.K. and Norwegian governments, and companies like Amazon, Bayer, H&M and Walmart. Prosecutors allege that the deal violates a law passed two months after its signing that bans the future sale of carbon credits, characterizing it as “an extractive and colonialist” form of negotiating and privatizing traditional territories.

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Farming has always been at the mercy of the weather, but recent years have seen unprecedented swings in temperature, rainfall, and storms. Droughts dry up fields, floods wash away seeds, and heatwaves scorch crops. These shifts don’t just threaten harvests—they destabilize farm incomes. Solar energy offers a much-needed anchor. By capturing sunlight, a constant even when the weather is wild, farmers can generate reliable electricity regardless of the season. This newfound consistency helps them weather financial storms even when nature is unpredictable.

In Ecuador, Indigenous communities are fighting for stronger safeguards to protect their sovereignty as more oil drilling looms. A right to say no to unwanted development could revolutionize a consultation process used around the world.

Tropical deforestation was found to cause large reductions in precipitation using a range of observation-based datasets1. However, the limitations of satellite-based space-for-time statistical analysis have hindered understanding of the roles of reshaped mesoscale atmospheric circulation and regional precipitation recycling at different scales. These effects are considered nonlocal effects, which are distinct from the local effects governed by deforestation-induced reductions in evapotranspiration (ET). Here we show reversed precipitation responses to Amazon deforestation across wet and dry seasons. During the wet season, deforested grids experienced a noteworthy increase in precipitation (0.96 mm per month per percentage point forest loss), primarily attributed to enhanced mesoscale atmospheric circulation (that is, nonlocal effect). These nonlocal increases weaken with distance from deforested grids, leading to significant precipitation reductions in buffers beyond 60 km. Conversely, during the dry season, precipitation decreases in deforested grids and throughout all analysis buffers, with local effects from reduced ET dominating. Our findings highlight the intricate balance between local effects and nonlocal effects in driving deforestation-precipitation responses across different seasons and scales and emphasize the urgent need to address the rapid and extensive loss of forest in the Amazon region.

Jason Baldes drove down a dusty, sagebrush highway earlier this month, pulling 11 young buffalo in a trailer up from Colorado to the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. His blue truck has painted on the side a drawing of buffalo and a calf. As the executive director of the Wind River Buffalo Initiative and Eastern Shoshone tribal member, he’s helped grow the number of buffalo on the reservation for the last decade. The latest count: the Northern Arapaho tribe have 97 and the Eastern Shoshone have 118.

I normally grow things like pioppino, lions mane and oysters, this is my first time growing a polypore. It took a long time, many months haha. I think this was inoculated back in november and I just got around to fruiting a few weeks ago. Lots of spore samples to put under the microscope, let me tell you.

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During my 2023-24 IIE Rodman C. Rockefeller Centennial Fellowship research in eastern Panama, I walked through my neighbor Johnson’s land (not his real name), discussing the 18 hectares (44 acres) of steeply inclined secondary forest he has left on his property. As we wandered along the forest’s edge, he turned to me and asked, “How much will you pay me not to cut this forest down?”

Some California Scrub-Jay's on the fence looking for a nest

In brief: - A new “natural capital account” for Colombia’s Upper Sinú Basin calculates the economic value of its natural ecosystems’ erosion control services to the energy and water sectors at $100 million (1.7% of the region’s GDP). An aqueduct under consideration to support increased coastal tourism would increase the value by 12%. - This is one of the first times outside Europe such an account has been created with locally validated models and data following the UN System of Environmental-Economic Accounting – Ecosystem Accounting framework. - This paper’s methodology offers a practical way to develop and apply such accounts regionally, laying the groundwork for compensation programs that protect nature and support livelihoods.

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Of the total burned areas, 78% are native vegetation

Swung by the Rancho Seco Nuclear Generating Station on my way home from camping

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