1. What is Global Systems Science?

Archive of Past Articles for Chapter 1

6 November 2006 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

24 April 2007. 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.''

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

20 January 2007. 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

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

14 January 2007. 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

November 2007. 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.

14 November 2006. 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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