Credit: Dave Armstrong via earthtimes.org

Check out what’s happened this week in forestry news!

Tropical rainforests are important carbon sinks that reduce global greenhouse gases, so the recent study investigating how tropical trees may be more drought-resistant shows how they’re adapting to climate change.

The “Trump Forest” project began a little under a year ago in response to President Trump’s pledge to pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement. Since then, over 3,300 people have donated funds to plant new forests around the world. The project hopes to combat Trump’s pro-fossil-fuel energy policy.

Climate change can influence the geographic distribution of a species due to their response to changing conditions, and it may also affect the evolutionary trajectories of interbreeding species. A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences examines the movement of the Eastern and Canadian tiger swallowtail butterfly to see how climate change affects the management of their biodiversity.

One of the biggest craters in Siberia’s permafrost region is known as the “doorway to the underworld” by the local Yakutian people. It’s growing so rapidly that long-buried forests, carcasses, and up to 200,000 years of historical climate records are being uncovered.

In recent years, the European red squirrel population has been competing for resources with the invasive North American gray squirrel. Scientists tested both squirrels’ problem-solving abilities with one simple puzzle, and a complex one, to investigate why the red squirrel population is decreasing.