Instagram Filming Logs: Beetles, Fire and Regeneration Failure, September 2023 – Central Rockies Bruce Melton, ClimateDiscovery.org (Instagram logs with photos and video are below the summary.) Across the Central Rockies from the San Juans to Rocky Mountain National Park, beetle attacks are growing again. The beetles and impacted trees are changing though. Gone are the…
Ocotillo mortality, Big Bend Ranch State Park, Three Dike Hill. The ocotillo in the foreground succumbed to bark beetles last season. Many more are in the frame, just hard to tell! It’s the desert ~ ~ ~ Chihuahuan Desert Walkabout – Desert Mortality from Climate Change By Bruce Melton We just returned from filming more…
Slowly and insidiously, or abruptly and finitely. Forests of all kinds are succumbing to climate change. Mountain forests, city forests, forests in the southeast and the far north. Pine, spruce, fir, oak, maple. Nontraditional forests too; the palms of LA, succulents in the desert. Yes, deserts are at risk too. Deserts as ecosystems are fragile…
One of the general quandaries about current climate change impacts and those with our future climate has been: “how do we end up with drying when precipitation increases with warming as we already see happening and is further projected in the future?” This research from Princeton, University of Southampton and the US Geological Survey does…
A recent article in Atlantic implies climate change to be wrongly viewed as something we don’t yet know much about. This article “American Trees Are Moving West, and No One Knows Why”, is half correct. The authors in the study reported upon reveal the reasons why trees are shifting west (as well as north), and…
This is the original long version with much more detail and all of the destinations and forest health descriptions along the 6,000 mile route. The abbreviated 2,000 word version was published on Truthout on February 16, 2016 is here. We were awash for 19 days in a tumultuous sea of mountains and forests, drifting a course through the heart…
University of Georgia forest ecologist Jacqueline Mohan tells us that not only is poison ivy already responding favorably to warming in Georgia, but its poison is getting more poisonous. The reason that poison ivy and other similar woody vines flourish in warmer climates (think Precambrian) is a symbiotic relationship with kind of fungi called arbuscular…
