Tree planting has been widely touted as a cost-effective way of reducing global warming, due to trees’ ability to store large quantities of carbon from the atmosphere.
The oldest fossilised forest known on Earth – dating from 390 million years ago – has been found in the high sandstone cliffs along the Devon and Somerset coast of South West England.
The Fens of eastern England, a low-lying, extremely flat landscape dominated by agricultural fields, was once a vast woodland filled with huge yew trees, according to new research.
Other threats to UK forests include competition with society for water, viral diseases, and extreme weather affecting forest management.
A new study led by Cambridge University confirms that planting hedges between roadsides and school playgrounds can dramatically reduce children’s exposure to traffic-related particle pollution.
Researchers have developed an algorithm that uses computer vision techniques to accurately measure trees almost five times faster than traditional, manual methods.
The first double-blind experiment analysing the role of human decision-making in climate reconstructions has found that it can lead to substantially different results.
Researchers have shown that over the past two thousand years, volcanoes have played a larger role in natural temperature variability than previously thought, and their climatic effects may have contributed to past societal and economic change.
The largest-ever study of tree rings from Norilsk in the Russian Arctic has shown that the direct and indirect effects of industrial pollution in the region and beyond are far worse than previously thought.
What connects a series of volcanic eruptions and severe summer cooling with a century of pandemics, human migration and the rise and fall of civilisations? Tree rings, says Ulf Büntgen, who leads Cambridge’s first dedicated tree-ring laboratory in the Department of Geography.
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