1. What is Global Systems Science?

Archive of Past Articles for Chapter 1

2008 July 22. NEW NASA 'FIRE & SMOKE' WEB PAGE SHOWS LATEST FIRE VIEWS, RESEARCH. Excerpt: WASHINGTON -- NASA satellites, aircraft, and research know-how have created a wealth of cutting-edge tools to help firefighters battle wildfires. These tools also have helped scientists understand the impact of fires and smoke on Earth's climate and ecosystems. Now, a new NASA Web site brings to the public and journalists the latest information about this ongoing effort.
The NASA "Fire and Smoke" Web site debuting Tuesday includes regular updates of NASA images of fires and their associated smoke plumes in the United States and around the world. The site also features articles on the latest research results and multimedia resources from across NASA. The site is updated regularly with new images from NASA's suite of Earth observing satellites and airborne observatories, including the unmanned Ikhana aircraft that recently pinpointed wildfire hotspots across California....

2007 July-August. EXPEDITION TO SIBERIA. NASA Earth Observatory. Blog entries from NASA scientists and Russia's Academy of Science on an expedition down the Kochechum River in north-central Siberia as they go in search of answers to the question "As Earth's temperature rises, what is happening to the great northern forests of Siberia?"

2006 November 6 NASA SUPPORTS UAS FIRE MAPPING EFFORTS ON CALIFORNIA FIRE From NASA Earth Observatory. A team led by NASA and U.S. Forest Service scientists recently collected real-time, visible and infrared data from sensors onboard a remotely piloted aircraft over the Esperanza Fire in Southern California.

 

Archive of Past Articles for Chapter 1

2. A History of Forest Use in the Pacific Northwest

Archive of Past Articles for Chapter 2

2007 April 24. Researchers Probe Fossilized Rain Forest. By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS. Excerpt: …coal miners working south and west of Georgetown have unearthed, chunk by fossilized chunk, what has revealed itself over the past few years to be the remains of a fossilized rain forest. It covers about 15 square miles, all more than 200 feet below ground, and probably is the largest intact rain forest from that period ever studied, according to Scott Elrick of the Illinois State Geological Survey…..''We never encountered one whole forest preserved in one shot like this,'' Elrick said Monday. ''The fossils just didn't stop.'' ...Elrick and researchers from the Smithsonian Institution and the University of Bristol in Great Britain started working in the mines a few years ago, driving deep underground in armored vehicles and then walking along miles of 7-foot-high passages. ...People who live in eastern Illinois may occasionally long for a few more trees, but they'd find the land that now sits just above the miners' heads a tough place to call home during the Pennsylvania Age, Elrick said....Elrick and the other researchers plan to continue documenting what's above the Vermilion County mines, drawing and taking pictures and notes. But that's all they'll do, he said……The area deep underground isn't suitable for preservation. ...''Unfortunately, it will never be a visitable museum kind of piece,'' Elrick said. ''We try to document to the best of our ability what we see, and take notes ... It's sort of like asking people to go to New York City and describe every store front in a day.''

2006 March 20. Mountain Residents Fight Water Co. Logging Plans. Tony Russomanno Reporting (CBS 5) LOS GATOS. Excerpt: A Google Earth virtual fly-over along a 5-mile length of Los Gatos Creek - between Lexington Reservoir and Lake Elsman in the Santa Cruz Mountains - shows the 1,000 acres of land the San Jose Water Company wants to log. [see video] The map was created by software engineer Rebecca Moore, who lives in the area, and it's being used to galvanize opposition to the company's plans.
"So instead of having an abstract map," says resident and logging opponent Kevin Flynn, "people can actually see their houses, see their schools, see where the logging zone is, and it changes an abstract concept to something that is quite striking." Flynn lives in one of the neighborhoods bordering the area planned for logging. "The largest trees, and the largest percentage of the cut will be the largest redwoods here, as well as the largest Douglas fir. Most all of these redwoods here are about 100 years old."
San Jose Water engineer John Tang says the logging area will be divided into nine zones. One zone will be logged every other year for six weeks. "If you're a neighbor in unit one, you're going to see us for six weeks in year one, possibly, for example. You won't see us again for another 16 years."
Mountain residents worry that logging will increase runoff and sediment in their drinking water, but Tang says the logging project will actually help improve water quality.
The company does concede that water quality could be harmed if logging is not done well, but Tang says their plan is well thought out. "The water is extremely important to us and we're not going to jeopardize that part of our business for the timber." ....

California Forest Products Commission -- http://www.calforests.org

Temperate Forest Foundation -- http://www.forestinfo.org/

Maine Forest Service

Global land-use database -- an historical global land-use inventory that chronicles the massive impact humans have had as they've remade the global landscape since the 17th century.

International Canopy Network
http://www.evergreen.edu/ican/

The Forest Canopy Lab at Evergreen State College
http://www.evergreen.edu/canopylab/

National Geographic "Branching Out" Project
http://www.geocities.com/canopylab/

eForest is a collaborative effort between researchers and forest resource managers integrating satellite technologies into forest inventory and field methods.

Forest Magazine
http://www.forestmag.org/

Journal of G. Allen Burrows
when he was a fire lookout in Idaho in 1916

Rainforest web
http://www.rainforestweb.org/

Tree Identification website -- http://forestry.about.com/cs/treeid/a/tree_id_web.htm

Archive of Past Articles for Chapter 2

 

Chapters

1. What is Global Systems Science?
2. A History of Forest Use in the Pacific Northwest
3. Case Study: The Headwaters Controversy
4. Field Trip to Wind River
5. Losing Tropical Rainforests
6. Towards a Sustainable World

Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) Nature's Voice Online.

Forest Magazine

3. Case Study: The Headwaters Controversy

Archive of Past Articles for Chapter 3

Winter 2008. Plan in Peril. Alice Talmadge, Forest Magazine. Excerpt: The war over old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest may not be over, despite a thirteen-year truce that has curtailed harvesting, protected water quality and provided habitat protection for threatened species such as the northern spotted owl and marbled murrelet. Measures that were put in place in 1994 by the Clinton-era Northwest Forest Plan are in danger of being drastically cut by a combination of economics, skewed science and political pressure to increase the timber cut in Oregon and the rest of the Pacific Northwest.
This August, the Bureau of Land Management proposed tripling the current amount of logging allowed on 2.5 million acres of forests-called O&C lands-that the agency manages in western Oregon....

2007 January 20. Pacific Lumber leans Company in Headwaters deal files for bankruptcy, citing logging restrictions. Tom Abate, San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer. Excerpt: The Pacific Lumber Co. has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, saying that environmental restrictions are preventing it from cutting enough redwoods to continue making payments on the roughly $714 million debt that Texas financier Charles Hurwitz incurred more than 20 years ago.... Pacific Lumber has been an environmental lightning rod in California ever since Hurwitz, aided by junk bond king Michael Milken, bought out the company in 1986 and more than doubled its cutting of old-growth redwood trees.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein brokered the 1999 Headwaters Forest deal in which Hurwitz's Maxxam Corp. agreed to sell about 10,000 acres of old-growth forest for $480 million to the government, which turned it into a park. It simultaneously agreed to a habitat conservation plan that obliged it to follow a strict set of logging rules on more than 200,000 remaining acres. ... In a statement Friday, Feinstein said she believes "Pacific Lumber is required to meet the obligations of the Habitat Conservation Plan whether or not they are in bankruptcy." ...Pacific Lumber ... In December ...filed a lawsuit in a state court in Fresno charging that the state has not lived up to its part in the Headwaters deal.
...The forestry department and the California Department of Fish and Game signed the Headwaters deal. But the State Water Resources Control Board did not, and environmentalists have persuaded it to limit Pacific Lumber's tree cutting to prevent more silt from fouling streams. Pacific Lumber says these additional restrictions were unforeseen, unnecessary and costly, while environmentalists have pointed to obvious silt deposits downstream of logging sites and argued successfully that state law requires the company to clean up its operations.
...Arnot, the Pacific Lumber spokeswoman, said the bankruptcy filing should not immediately affect the 538 people who work for the company. But its workforce has been shrinking. In December, Pacific Lumber cut its workforce by 19 percent....See also

Archive of Past Articles for Chapter 3

 

4. Field Trip to Wind River

Archive of Past Articles for Chapter 4

2008 February 29. The Giving Trees. By Sharon Levy, OnEarth. Excerpt: ...Mass deforestation, particularly in tropical countries such as Brazil and Indonesia, accounts for more than 20 percent of annual greenhouse gas emissions. Meanwhile, recent studies show that Northern Hemisphere forests, now beginning to bulk up as they recover from centuries of logging, capture large amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere...
People who cut down trees for a living tend to measure their value in dollars and cents. Traditionally, the timber industry has seen mature forests, with massive trees left standing and big logs rotting on the ground, as examples of waste; replanted clear-cuts...represent an ideal of economic productivity. Now global warming has forced foresters to address the impact of logging on the flow of carbon between forests and the atmosphere, and many in the industry have insisted that stands of young, fast-growing trees capture carbon more efficiently than do older forests. Using a recently developed technology called...eddy flux measurement, Bev Law and her colleagues are showing that those assumptions are wrong.
It turns out that forests hundreds of years old can continue to actively absorb carbon, holding great quantities in storage. Resprouting clear-cuts, on the other hand, often emit carbon for years, despite the rapid growth rate of young trees. On the dry eastern face of the Cascades, for example, where trees grow slowly, a replanted clear-cut gives off more CO2 than it absorbs for as much as 20 years. "That's a long time," Law observes, "during which microbes respiring in the soil, rather than trees photosynthesizing aboveground, dominate the carbon balance."
Can we develop a new model of forest economics that draws on this knowledge -- a model that makes sense to foresters as well as the policy makers and conservationists who are now taking the first steps toward developing a viable market in forest carbon? Depending on how we treat forests...they can be either major emitters of CO2 or highly efficient "sinks" that remove the greenhouse gas from the atmosphere. Because financial pressures drive deforestation, the hope is that putting a cash value on the carbon captured and stored by living trees will one day provide an alternative economic incentive to those who do the cutting...

Forest Fires

October 2003. Wildfires in Southern California [1.3MB PDF NASA Lithograph] Uncontrolled wildfire is one of the most destructive natural forces known to mankind. An average of 20,234 square kilometers (5 million acres) burns every year in the United States, causing millions of dollars in damage. But not all wildfire is destructive; prescribed and controlled fires can be beneficial by naturally thinning overcrowded forests and reducing fuel supplies, preparing sites for seeding or planting, managing competing vegetation, and creating varied vegetation patterns that provide diverse habitat for plants and animals.

August 2002. MODIS - Rapid Response [3MB PDF NASA Lithograph] In mid-July 2002, lightning started a fire in the Klamath Mountains in southwestern Oregon that eventually burned over the state line into California and consumed more than 400,000 acres by late August. The Biscuit fire became one of the largest in the state's history, threatening not only human life and property, but also three nationally designated wild and scenic rivers and habitat for several species of plants and animals already at risk of extinction. Firefighters also had their hands full with other fires across the state, including the Tiller Complex Fire to the northeast.

Archive of Past Articles for Chapter 4

 

5. Losing Tropical Rainforests

Archive of Past Articles for Chapter 5

2008 Mar 5. Amazon Fires on the Rise. By Rebecca Lindsey , NASA Earth Observatory.
In 2006, fires and smoke in the Amazon declined significantly for the first time in nearly a decade. Is Amazon burning under control?

2007 January 14. Brazil Gambles on Monitoring of Amazon Loggers. By LARRY ROHTER, The New York Times REALIDADE, Brazil - A Brazilian government plan set to go into effect this year will bring large-scale logging deep into the heart of the Amazon rain forest for the first time, in a calculated gamble that new monitoring efforts can offset any danger of increased devastation. ...The government of President Luiz In‡cio Lula da Silva, in an attempt to create Brazil's first coherent, effective forest policy, is to begin auctioning off timber rights to large tracts of the rain forest. The winning bidders will not have title to the land or the right to exploit resources other than timber, and the government says they will be closely monitored and will pay a royalty on their activities. The architects of the plan say it will also help reduce tensions over land ownership in the Amazon, the world's largest tropical forest, which loses an area the size of New Jersey every year to clear-cutting and timbering. In theory, 70 percent of the jungle is public land, but miners, ranchers and especially loggers have felt free to establish themselves in unpoliced areas, strip the land of valuable resources and then move on, mostly in the so-called arc of destruction on the eastern and southern fringes of the jungle. But the called-for monitoring of the loggers allowed into the rain forest's largely untouched center will come from a new, untested Forest Service with only 150 employees and from state and municipal governments. That concerns environmental and civic groups ....

Archive of Past Articles for Chapter 5

 

6. Towards a Sustainable World

Archive of Past Articles for Chapter 6

2008 May/June. Tar Sands Rush Threatens to Devour Canadian Boreal Forest. Nature's Voice, NRDC. Excerpt: In the old-growth boreal forest of Canada's Alberta Province, a sprawling network of bogs, lakes and rivers provides a pristine breeding ground for millions of North America's songbirds and waterfowl. Lynx and caribou roam undisturbed among the forest's dense stands of aspen and poplar. But in recent years, soaring demand for oil has driven energy companies to strip bare thousands of acres of this thriving wildlife habitat to produce fuel from buried tar sands -- an immensely polluting and energy-intensive process even by oil industry standards.
...The tar sands found deep beneath Alberta's vast old-growth forests are made up of 90 percent sand, clay, silt, and water and 10 percent bitumen, a tarlike substance that can be converted to oil. Currently, most tar sands production relies on open pit mines, some as large as three miles wide and 200 feet deep. Because less than 20 percent of the oil-producing bitumen deposits are close to the surface, the rest of the deep reserves must be extracted by injecting steam underground and pumping out the melted bitumen. The amount of natural gas used daily during these processes could heat about four million American homes. Once separated from the sand, clay and silt, the bitumen is still of low grade and must undergo yet another energy-intensive process to turn it into a crude oil that more closely resembles conventional oil.
Over the past ten years, oil production from Alberta's tar sands has doubled to more than one million barrels per day. Seventy-five percent of that oil is bound for the United States as both raw and refined products. Driven by skyrocketing U.S. demand, the tar sands rush has spawned a rapidly expanding web of pipelines, roads and wells that threatens to destroy and fragment more than 55,000 square miles of boreal forest habitat -- an area the size of Florida.
...The massive amount of energy needed to extract, upgrade and refine tar sands oil generates three times the amount of global warming pollution as conventional oil production.
...Most Americans are unaware that fully 8 percent of our oil supply already comes from Alberta's tar sands....

2008 Apr 24. Plight of the pines. Brian Hoyle, Nature Reports. Excerpt: Under attack from pine beetles that are thriving in a warmer climate, Canada's boreal forests could become a sizeable source of emissions in the coming decade. Brian Hoyle reports. ...By the end of 2006, the mountain pine beetle...had ravaged 130,000 square kilometres of forest in western Canada.
...Not only is this bad news for the affected trees, whose fate is sealed once the beetle takes hold; the infestation also packs an atmospheric punch. According to scientists who have published a new study in this week's Nature, the assault on British Columbia's pine trees could cause the region to release more carbon dioxide than it absorbs from the atmosphere over the coming decade.
...Led by ecologist Werner Kurz at the Pacific Forestry Centre of the Canadian Forestry Service, the study used a carbon budget model to assess the cumulative impact of various factors - including tree deaths from beetle infestations, forest fires and logging - on the carbon balance of British Columbia's pine forests between 2000 and 2020....

2008 March 17, A Forest of Change. By Beth Daley. The Boston Globe. Excerpt: Scientists have long thought it would take generations if not centuries for tree populations to shift in response to a warming world. But climate change might affect New England forests far sooner than scientists thought . …a study published earlier this month that found that the boundary between northern hardwoods and colder-loving trees shifted about 350 feet uphill in the last 40 years in response to warming temperatures. Climate change is likely only one factor in the forest transformation.
…New England has warmed 2 to 4 degrees Fahrenheit in the last 40 years and it's the consensus of scientists that part of the warming is due to the release of heat-trapping gases from power plants, factories, and vehicles.
…Still, many questions remain. Trees on mountains don't only respond to temperature; precipitation, cloud cover, and wind also determine everything from height to health to the location of the tree line… the answers are complicated. Other factors such as beech bark disease may have killed off enough trees to trigger some of the changes he found in forest composition. Acid rain also likely contributed to the decline of red spruce trees at high elevations.
The long-term prognosis for New England's iconic sugar maples is mixed... But it may be centuries before farmers see any dramatic change in species composition in their carefully managed maple forests.

2008 Feb 1. Ancient Forest to Modern City. By Holli Riebeek, NASA Earth Observatory. To understand how local weather shifted when the towering forests of the eastern United States gave way to fields and cities, scientists must reconstruct the region's historical landscapes.

2007 November. The Story of Stuff: a 20 minute video about our production and consumption patterns showing the connections between a number of environmental and social issues, and the idea of systems on planet Earth.

Fall 2007, Forest Magazine. Blight on the Land. By James Johnston. Excerpt:
It's May, and signs of spring are everywhere along Salmon Creek in northwest Pennsylvania's Allegheny National Forest. The knobby buds of hardwoods are unfolding into brilliant, lime-green leaves. ...
Cherry blossoms float lazily downstream in shallow pools of crystal-clear water.
It'd be an idyllic scene, except for the dark, heavy smell of oil.
And the squat, angular oil rigs resting on freshly cleared pads every 500 feet for miles.
Oil and gas booms are nothing new to the area-they're older than the national forest itself. Years ago, the primeval eastern hemlock and American beech forest was private land, logged off by the end of the nineteenth century, leaving barren hills and muddy streams as far as the eye could see. In 1911, Congress passed the Weeks Act, which authorized the federal government to purchase denuded forestland in the eastern states. The Allegheny National Forest was established in 1923. The locals mockingly called it the "Allegheny Brush Patch"; no one thought it would ever recover.
But a second-growth forest of sun-loving species like black cherry, red maple, black birch and sugar maple did grow back. By the 1950s the U.S. Forest Service was planning the first black cherry clear-cuts. By the early 1990s black cherry, ideal for furniture and veneer, was selling for astronomical prices: close to $5,000 for a thousand board feet of the rich, reddish-brown wood. Black cherry harvest eventually declined in the late '90s in the face of falling prices and environmental litigation-just in time for the current oil and gas boom.
TO UNDERSTAND HOW SALMON Creek could have been overrun by an oil field, it helps to know the unusual history of the Allegheny. When Congress purchased the land eighty years ago, it only purchased the surface. The mineral estate underlying the forest, the enormous caverns of black gold-an uncommon "sweet" crude ideal for refinement into valuable lubricants and wax products-remained the property of oil companies who can, by law, demand and receive "reasonable access" to their underground property...
OIL AND GAS DEVELOPMENT ON THE Allegheny is so rampant that even snowmobilers-long the bane of respectable environmentalists-are starting to [complain] ...
... awake to the roar of truck traffic and the angry whine of pump jacks. Roads, gravel pits and well pads have replaced quiet woods ....

2006 November 14. Studies Find Danger to Forests in Thinning Without Burning. By JIM ROBBINS, NY Times. Excerpt: MISSOULA, Mont. - Thinning forests without also burning accumulated brush and deadwood may increase forest fire damage rather than reduce it, researchers at the Forest Service reported in two recent studies. The findings cast doubt on how effective some of the thinning done under President Bush's Healthy Forests Initiative will be at preventing fires if the forests are not also burned. The studies show that in forests that have been thinned but not treated with prescribed burning, tree mortality is much greater than in forests that have had thinning and burning and those that have been left alone. Another study, on Blacks Mountain Experimental Forest in Northern California, had similar findings. The studies, combined with other recent research showing that climate change is reducing snowpack and making the fire season longer and more intense, have prompted researchers to urge the Forest Service to use prescribed fire more. "We need fire on the ground," said Dr. Ronald H. Wakimoto, a professor of forestry at the University of Montana who studies fire. "The only thing that stops fires is previous fire or prescribed fire."...

 

Archive of Past Articles for Chapter 6

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