Global Forestation ~ Changes over Time...

BBC Reality Check's Jack Goodman asks Deforestation: What’s wrong with planting new forests?

Sugi Circles ~ Japanese Tree Spacing Test

Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries in 1973 engaged in...

“experimental forestry” and one of the experiments was to try and measure the effect of tree spacing on growth. The experiment was carried out by planting sugi (Japanese cedar) trees in 10 degree radial increments forming 10 concentric circles of varying diameters."

Making Nature Useless ~ Beyond Peak Farmland

Ronald Bailey at Reason asks Can We Save Nature by Making It Economically Useless?

“Decoupling” human economy from ecology could render large areas of pastures, croplands, and managed forests too remote for exploitation. [...] "The way we will save nature is by rendering it economically worthless," declared Ted Nordhaus. Nordhaus, chairman of the Breakthrough Institute, was speaking at "Making Nature Useless," a seminar sponsored by the D.C.-based think tank Resources for the Future. With that one sentence, he summed up the entire session’s theme. [...] "Why are we using just half of the planet's ice-free land surface?" he asked the audience. Cropland only occupies about 12 percent; pasture, 24 percent; managed forests, 9 percent; cities, 3 percent. About 12 percent of the world's ice-free land, he noted, has been formally set aside for conservation and preservation. What makes that 12 percent different? His answer is that, for the most part, it is too high, too dry, too steep, and too remote. We have saved what we have saved, he suggested, largely because it is not worth anything economically. Most of the lands that are not legally protected but remain unexploited share the same economically off-putting characteristics. [...] humanity is on the cusp of "peak farmland." If current land-use trends continue, an enormous amount of crop and pasture land will be abandoned and returned to nature. [...] Urbanization contributes to the process of decoupling economy and ecology, since fewer hungry people engaged in low productivity subsistence farming mean more land for nature. [...] Analysts with old-fashioned Malthusian mindsets are again decrying the imminent approach of "peak everything" followed by a collapse of civilization. The data presented at Wednesday's seminar points toward a much happier version of "peak everything," as humanity increasingly withdraws from the natural world during the rest of this century."

Ant Architects ~ Cool Properties & Capabilities...

Ants are collective creators of remarkable homes and temporary structures. To explore this further, check out when a fire ant colony is filled with molten aluminum and the cast is dug up and cleansed... See more lovely example casts at Anthill Art! Fire ant groups also demonstrate remarkable hydrophobic properties... This means they can self-configure into massive rafts... Curiously enough, as a collective they also behave like a fluid... A different species creates a giant ant hill which is here filled with concrete and excavated... To get a better sense of how ants live and organize, here's the investigative BBC show, Planet Ant ~ Life Inside The Colony of Central American leafcutter ants... Maybe that whets your appetite for the BBC's Ant Attack! And NatGeo's City of Ants too...

De Nieuwe Wildernis ~ NL's New Wilderness...

Thanks to Branko Collin at 24Oranges for spotting De Nieuwe Wildernis wildlife documentary trailer...

Adventure Is Calling ~ America's Great Spaces!

Thanks to Alex Santoso at Neatorama for spotting Adventure Is Calling timelapse vista by Shane Black & crew with view of a dozen of America's great National Parks!

Petite Ceinture ~ Wild Little Belt Rail in Paris!

Nice BBC Stop/Start story by Neil Meads with French photographer Thomas Jorion on The wild abandoned railway in the centre of Paris...

"For 32km (almost 20 miles) the tracks of Petite Ceinture snake through bustling Paris, isolated and largely unseen from street level in deep trenches, long tunnels, and bridges. Nature has reclaimed the space and it has become a haven for wild flowers and animals. The line is officially off-limits to the public, but this hasn't stopped many people attempting to explore it. There is now a fierce debate in the French capital about what to do with the tracks and stations of the Petite Ceinture that still remain."

Cyanide Slaughter ~ 300 Zim Elephants Poisoned

Peta Thornycroft and Aislinn Laing of The Telegraph share the horrific news of ecocide in Zimbabwe where poachers have slaughtered over 300 elephants and hundreds of collateral animals by deploying cyanide salt-licks and poisoning watering holes as well...

"The full extent of the devastation wreaked in Hwange, the country's largest national park, has been revealed by legitimate hunters who discovered what conservationists say is the worst single massacre in southern Africa for 25 years. Pictures taken by the hunters, which have been obtained exclusively by The Telegraph, reveal horrific scenes. Parts of the national park, whose more accessible areas are visited by thousands of tourists each year, can be seen from the air to be littered with the deflated corpses of elephants, often with their young calves dead beside them, as well as those of other animals."

P.S. Thanks to George Dvorsky at io9 for spotting this.

Ant Architects ~ Aluminum Casts of Colonies...

ScienceDump spots aluminum cast of underground ant colonies...

Cool Nature ~ Roen Horn Shares Awesomeness!

UD spots Roen Horn's awesome nature video edits!

Gearlegs ~ Jumping Juvenile Issus Coleoptratus!

Sindya Bhanoo in the NYTimes Observatory column spots the study by Bristol researchers Malcolm Burrows and Gregory Sutton of the gear mechanism in the hind legs of the juvenile Issus Coleoptratus...

"...a champion jumper found in gardens throughout Europe. Its coglike joints were first described in the 1950s, but it was only with advanced high-speed video that the scientists were able to prove how the joints worked. Before the insect leaps forward, it hooks its gear teeth on one leg to the gear teeth on the other. That way, Dr. Burrows said, “the power is delivered to both legs at the same time, so no leg is twisted.” The legs are synchronized within 30 millionths of a second."

Penguin Perspective ~ Emperors w/ Crittercam

NatGeo's Crittercam allows animal-eye perspective on life...

"Crittercam was conceived in 1986 by marine biologist and filmmaker Greg Marshall. A shark approached Greg during a diving trip off Belize, then disappeared into the murk with three quick strokes of its tail. Greg noticed a remora (or sucker fish) clinging to the shark. As Greg watched the shark disappear, it occurred to him that if he could put a camera in the place of the remora, he could see the shark's behavior unfold without disturbing the shark. More than two decades later Greg heads the Remote Imaging Program at National Geographic. Collaborating with scientists worldwide, Greg and his team have deployed Crittercam on hundreds of animals to help investigate biological mysteries."

Here's Emperor Penguins!

Printing Buildings ~ MIT's Oxman on CNN Next

Great to see MIT Media Lab colleague Neri Oxman on CNN Next...

"A new model of the world has emerged over the past few decades: the World-as- Organism. This new model inspires a desire to instill intelligence into objects, buildings and cities. It is a model that stands in contrast to the paradigm of the Industrial Revolution, or the World-as-Machine. [...] the future lies in questioning what an inhabitable structure is. When we consider printing concrete with variable density as in bones, we do not mean to do this simply to reproduce the same old buildings. These technologies will enable us to create buildings that are entirely different than the ones that we inhabit today."

Mapping Cape Town ~ Spotlight on SA Supercity

Cape Town, South Africa in maps...

Fire Whirl ~ Curtin Springs, Australia Tornado++

DailyMail spots Aussie Fire Whirl!

More Natural Beauty ~ Lovely Animal Images!

Lovely animal images-of-the-day...

See also DailyMail's mini-me animal photogallery!

Shark Attack ~ Great White Slo-Mo via Phantom!

UniqueDaily spots Slow Motion Shark Attack shot with ITM Phantom!

Hell on Earth? ~ No, Just Eyjafjallajökull 2010 !-)

NASA APOD spots action photo by Sigurður Stefnisson of Eyjafjallajökull erupting fire and brimstone amid thunder and lighting!

Lightning Slo-Mo ~ 7,207 Frames per Second;-)

Thanks to The Kid Should See This for spotting lightning slo-mo! ZT Research captures...

"A downward lightning negative ground flash captured at 7,207 images per second. A negative stepped leader emerges from the cloud and connects with the ground forming a return stroke."

Public Lands, Private Profits ~ Green Hysteria?

NYTimes Green blogger Joanna Foster spots mini-documentary Public Lands, Private Profits...

"The films focus on three treasured places in the public trust that are threatened by private mining and drilling proposals, including areas around the Grand Canyon that are still open to uranium mining, a proposal to expand coal mining near Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah and the introduction of natural gas drilling around Bridger-Teton National Forest in Wyoming. [What is] appropriate use of the 700 million acres of public lands that belong to all Americans."

See trailer...