Conservation / Tree Health

Long-lived humans having nothing on trees. Some forest giants, like the Ginkgo biloba, can live more than 3000 years. Now, in the most comprehensive plant aging study to date, researchers have revealed the molecular mechanisms that allow the ginkgo—and perhaps other trees—to survive so long.

The new study provides the first real genetic evidence for something scientists have long suspected: “The default condition in plants is immortality,” says Howard Thomas, a plant biologist from Aberystwyth University who was not involved in the work.

A potential ally for one of North America’s most embattled trees has passed its first big test. A tiny predatory beetle that researchers have been rearing and releasing into forests appears to be doing damage to an aphidlike pest that poses a deadly threat to ecologically important eastern hemlock trees, a 5-year study has found.

Little red buds poke through the bark of burnt eucalyptus trees in the Blue Mountains. It's been just over a month since the Gospers Mountain fire tore through, but regeneration has begun.

The early signs of recovery are positive, but ecologists are preparing for "a lot of loss" as they begin the challenges of conserving, managing and studying bushfire affected ecosystems.

Firefighters have saved the only known natural stand of Wollemi pines, so-called “dinosaur trees” that fossil records show existed up to 200m years ago, from the bushfires that have devastated New South Wales.

The state’s environment minister, Matt Kean, said a specially deployed team of remote air firefighters helped save the critically endangered trees from the giant Gospers Mountain fire.

WAIPOUA FOREST, New Zealand — Two arborists, chest-deep in underbrush, secured a rope slung over a branch in the Waipoua Forest, close to the northern tip of New Zealand.

Scott Forrest pumped his fist. “Yeah, great stuff,” he said. He recently won the world championship for tree climbing.

But the job this day was a special privilege.

He was about to ascend a 148-foot-tall, 2,000-year-old kauri tree known as Tane Mahuta, a tree so sacred to the indigenous Maori people that even touching it is taboo.

The earliest fossilised trees, dating back 386 million years, have been found at an abandoned quarry in New York.

Scientists believe the forest they belonged to was so vast it originally stretched beyond Pennsylvania.

This discovery in Cairo, New York, is thought to be two or three million years older than what was previously the world's oldest forest at Gilboa, also in New York State.

The findings throw new light on the evolution of trees.

What did they find?

Societal Impact Statement

The elm tree can return to the British countryside, given a helping hand, according to a new report.

More than 20 million trees died during the 1960s and 1970s from Dutch elm disease.

In the aftermath, the elm was largely forgotten, except among a handful of enthusiasts who have been breeding elite elms that can withstand attack.

At the National Institute of Amazonian Research (INPA) in Manaus, Brazil, a framed exhibit of a massive dried leaf has been a local attraction for decades. But the complete identity of the tree it belongs to remained unresolved — until now.

With increasing regularity, Californians are witnessing firsthand the destructive power of wildfires. But not everyone sees what happens after the flames die down, when debris is cleared, homes and lives rebuilt — and trees replanted to help nature recover.

New research led by UCLA evolutionary biologist Victoria Sork examines whether the trees being replanted in the wake of California’s fires will be able to survive a climate that is continuing to warm.