News at a glance: U.S. tallies old-growth forests, Canadian scientists march for higher pay, and condor poop reveals the birds ’ ancient history

FOREST ECOLOGY U.S. boosts tally of old forests Last year, President Joe Biden surprised forest scientists when he ordered an inventory of the government’s holdings of mature and old-growth forests by this Earth Day. It triggered a scramble by the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management to create a formal definition of what constitutes “mature” and “old-growth” forests and to apply those definitions across millions of hectares. Meeting the 22 April deadline last month, the agencies released their findings in a report , noting that of the nearly 72 million hectares of forest they manage, 45% are mature and 18% are old growth. The figures, which exceed estimates published by nonfederal researchers, include 9 million hectares of pinyon-juniper woodlands (pictured here in Utah)—a forest type that was previously rarely categorized as old growth. The report’s findings are likely to fuel a raging debate about how to manage older forests and make them resilient to climate change. RESEARCH SECURITY Chemist gets home confinement A U.S. district judge last week sentenced former Harvard University chemist Charles Lieber to 6 months of home confinement and fined him $50,000 for lying to federal agencies about his interactions with a Chinese university and failing to report payments from it. The ruling ended the most publicized case of some two dozen recent criminal prosecutions of U.S. ...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news