1) J. A. Carr, et al. Anticipated impacts of achieving SDG targets on forests - a review, Forest Policy and Economics, 126, 2021.

機関報告：210310 University of Leeds:
グローバルな持続可能な開発が森林にどのように影響するか
Global targets to improve the welfare of people across the planet will have mixed impacts on the world’s forests. The research reviewed a wide range of existing academic papers into the UN’s global goals.

2) NASA: 2020 tied for warmest year on record, NASA analysis shows, 2021.

機関報告：10115  NASA:
2020年は記録上最も暖かい年だった
Earth's global average surface temperature in 2020 tied with 2016 as the warmest year on record. Continuing the planet's long-term warming trend, the year's globally averaged temperature was 1.84 degrees Fahrenheit (1.02 degrees Celsius) warmer than the baseline 1951-1980 mean.

3) J. M. Bennett, et al. The evolution of critical thermal limits of life on Earth, Nature Communications, 12(1198), 2021.

機関報告：210304  McGill University:
気候変動は種の適応を上回るか？種は耐寒性よりもゆっくりと耐熱性を進化させる
Many species might be left vulnerable in the face of climate change, unable to adapt their physiologies to respond to rapid global warming. Species evolve heat tolerance more slowly than cold tolerance, and the level of heat they can adapt to has limits.

4) C. Abel, et al. The human-environment nexus and vegetation-rainfall sensitivity in tropical drylands, Nature Sustainability, 4, pp. 25-32, 2021.

機関報告：201126  Faculty of Science - University of Copenhagen:
衛星画像は気候変動の不均一な影響を示している
More than 40 percent of Earth's ecosystems are arid, an amount that is expected to increase significantly over the course of the 21st century. Some of these areas, such as those in Africa and Australia may be savannah or desert, where sparse rainfall has long been the norm. Within these biomes, vegetation and wildlife have adapted to making use of their scant water resources, but they are also extraordinarily vulnerable to climate change.

5) J. A. Oldekop, et al. Forest-linked livelihoods in a globalized world, Nature Plants, 6 (12), pp.1400-1407, 2020.

機関報告： 201201  University of Manchester:
次の10年で森林に影響を与える「メガトレンド」
A group of experts have identified five large-scale ‘megatrends’ affecting forests and forest communities. These are likely to have major consequences - both positively and negatively - over the coming decade.

6) F. Tromboni, et al. Macrosystems as metacoupled human and natural systems, Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 19 (1), pp. 20-29, 2021.

機関報告：210202  Michigan State University:
地理学と生態学の法則を破る
All that’s local is a lot more global, and scientists say solutions can only be found through broader views and collaborations nearby and far away. Recent global calamities – the pandemic, wildfires, floods – are spurring interdisciplinary scientists to nudge aside the fashionable First Law of Geography that dictates “everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things.”

7) M. Disney, et al. New 3D measurements of large redwood trees for biomass and structure. Scientific Reports, 10 (16721), 2020.

機関報告： 201015 University College London：
レーザー技術で世界最大樹木のバイオマスを測定

Laser technology has been used to measure the volume and biomass of giant Californian redwood trees for the first time, records a new studys. The technique offers unprecedented insights into the 3D structure of trees, helping scientists to estimate how much carbon they absorb and how they might respond to climate change.

8) M. Ehbrecht, et al. Global patterns and climatic controls of forest structural complexity, Nature Communications, 12 (519), 2021.

機関報告：210205 University of Göttingen：
3Dで見る世界の森：森林構造の複雑さを分析する
Primeval forests are of great importance for biodiversity and global carbon and water cycling. The three-dimensional structure of forests plays an important role here because it influences processes of gas and energy exchange with the atmosphere, whilst also providing habitats for numerous species.

9) A. J. Hansen, et al. A policy-driven framework for conserving the best of Earth’s remaining moist tropical forests, Nature Ecology & Evolution, 4, pp. 1377-1384, 2020.

機関報告： 200810  Northern Arizona University：
気候変動を緩和し、人間の幸福を保護するために、「最後のベスト」の熱帯林が緊急に保護を必要としている
The world’s “best of the last” tropical forests are at significant risk of being lost. Of these pristine forests that provide key services—including carbon storage, prevention of disease transmission and water provision—only a mere 6.5 percent are formally protected.

10) A. Lausch, et al. Linking Earth Observation and taxonomic, structural and functional biodiversity: Local to ecosystem perspectives, Ecological Indicators, 70, pp. 317-339, 2016.
 

機関報告： 161212  Helmholtz Centre For Environmental Research - UFZ：
リモートセンシングは生物多様性研究においてますます重要になっている：新しい衛星はさらなる機会を開く
To measure biodiversity, researchers have been using various methods of remote sensing for about 30 years in addition to traditional field studies. An international team of researchers present current opportunities, developments and prospects of remote sensing and highlight its enormous potential in assisting future biodiversity research.

11) C. M. Lee, et al. Mapping vegetation health around the world, EOS (Science News by AGU), 101, 2020.  (Accessed 2021. 7. 10)
 

機関報告： 200708  EOS：世界の植生の健康度マッピング：
2018年6月、NASAは国際宇宙ステーションの機器を使うエコストレスミッションを開始
A new spaceborne sensor monitors Earth’s surface temperature at a resolution higher than ever before, providing information on ecosystem responses to changes in water availability and climate stressors.

12) H. S. Grantham, et al. Anthropogenic modification of forests means only 40% of remaining forests have high ecosystem integrity, Nature Communications, 11 (5978), 2020.
 

機関報告： 201209  University of Queensland:
指数で世界の森林の完全性を示す
Only 40 per cent of forests are considered to have high ecological integrity, according to a new global measure, the Forest Landscape Integrity Index.

13) L. Belbin, et al. The Atlas of Living Australia: History, current state and future directions, Biodiversity Data Journal, 9(e65023), 2021
 

機関報告： 210422  Pensoft Publishers：
1つのデータセットでオーストラリアの生物多様性を解明
Australia's unique and highly endemic flora and fauna are threatened by rapid losses in biodiversity and ecosystem health, caused by human influence and environmental challenges. To monitor and respond to these trends, scientists and policy-makers need reliable data.

14) P. Duffy, et al. Drone Technologies for Conservation, WWF Conservation Technology Series, 1 (5), 123 p, 2020.
 

機関報告： 201120  University of Exeter：
保全のためのドローンの使用に関する新しいガイド
The report outlines "best practices" for using drones effectively and safely, while minimising impacts on wildlife.

15) A. Farinha, et al. Unmanned Aerial Sensor Placement for Cluttered Environments, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 5 (4): pp. 6623-6630, 2020.
 

機関報告： 201103  Imperial College London：
森林をパトロールするドローンで環境と生態系の変化を監視
Researchers have created drones that can attach sensors to trees to monitor environmental and ecological changes in forests.

16) F. Moffette, et al. The impact of near-real-time deforestation alerts across the tropics, Nature Climate Change, 11, pp. 172-178, 2021. 
 

機関報告： 210104 Oregon State University:

アラートシステムで森林破壊を減らし気候変動を緩和
Forest loss declined 18% in African nations where a new satellite-based program provides free alerts when it detects deforestation activities. The Global Land Analysis and Discovery System, known as GLAD, resulted in carbon sequestration benefits worth hundreds of millions of dollars in GLAD’s first two years.

17) A. L. Parker,et al. Applications of Satellite Radar Imagery for Hazard Monitoring: Insights from Australia, Remote Sensing, 13 (8), 1422, 2021.

機関報告：210423  Curtin University:
レーダー衛星で山火事や洪水の防災を強化
New research led by Curtin University has revealed how radar satellites can improve the ability to detect, monitor, prepare for and withstand natural disasters in Australia including bushfires, floods and earthquakes.

18) FAO: Global Forest Resources Assessment 2020, 2020.

機関報告：FAO   (Accessed 2021. 7. 6) 

19) M. Brandt, et al. An unexpectedly large count of trees in the West African Sahara and Sahel, Nature, 587, pp. 78-82, 2020.

機関報告：201014  CNRS：
予想外に多くの樹木が西サハラとサヘルに生育している
The number of trees inhabiting the Western Sahara, the Sahel and the Sudanian zone has exceeded the expectations of scientists, with more than 1.8 billion having been located thanks to an international collaboration including researchers from the CNRS.

20) P. W Keys, et al. A machine-learning approach to human footprint index estimation with applications to sustainable development, Environmental Research Letters, 16 (4), 2021.

機関報告：210414  Colorado State University：
土地に対する人間の圧力を示す衛星地図は持続可能な開発に関する洞察を提供
The team outlines a satellite-based map of human pressure on lands around the world. The team used machine learning to produce the map, which reveals where abrupt changes in the landscape have taken place around the world. This type of a map could be used to monitor progress for the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 15 (SDG15), “Life on Land,” which aims to foster sustainable development while conserving biodiversity.

21) K. C. Rodman, et al. A changing climate is snuffing out post‐fire recovery in montane forests, Global Ecology and Biogeography, 29 (11), pp. 2039-2051, 2020.

機関報告：200902  University of Colorado at Boulder：
山火事で焼け焦げた森林は回復する可能性が低く草地に変わる可能性がある
With flames racing across hundreds of square miles throughout Colorado and California this summer and a warming climate projected to boost wildfire activity across the West, residents can’t help but wonder what our beloved forests will look like in a few decades. A new study offers an unprecedented glimpse, suggesting that when forests burn across the Southern Rocky Mountains, many will not grow back and will instead convert to grasslands and shrublands.

22) E. Hirsch & I. Koren, Record-breaking aerosol levels explained by smoke injection into the stratosphere, Science, 371 (6535), pp. 1269-1274, 2021.
 

機関報告： 210318  Weizmann Institute of Science：
山火事の煙が世界中をどのように移動したか
A study uncovers how some Australian fires produced a spreading stratospheric haze rivaling that of a volcanic eruption. It’s not just how hot the fires burn – it’s also where they burn that matters. During the recent extreme fire season in Australia, which began in 2019 and burned into 2020, millions of tons of smoke particles were released into the atmosphere. Most of those particles followed a typical pattern and settled to the ground after a day or week; however, the particles created in fires burning in one area of the country managed to blanket the entire Southern Hemisphere for months. When studying particle-laden haze, two researchers noticed puzzling spikes in a certain measurement, and tracked the elevated levels to the fires in that area. Next, the Israeli scientists uncovered the “perfect storm” of circumstances that swept the particles emitted from those fires into the upper atmosphere and spread them over the entire Southern Hemisphere.

23) J. A. Wang,et al. Disturbance suppresses the aboveground carbon sink in North American boreal forests, Nature Climate Change, 11, pp. 435-441, 2021.
 

機関報告： 210429  University of California - Irvine：
北極圏の緑化」は私たちを救わない
The Arctic is getting greener as the climate warms — but it’s not greening fast enough to absorb very much carbon dioxide. There was a hope that as more plants start to grow in Arctic and boreal latitudes as our warming climate makes those regions more hospitable for plants, those photosynthesizing plants would work to help sequester the atmospheric carbon dioxide that helped them flourish in the first place. But new research suggests that all the new green biomass is not as large a carbon sink as scientists had hoped.

24) Y. Chen, et al. Future increases in Arctic lightning and fire risk for permafrost carbon, Natural Climate Change, 11, pp. 404-410, 2021.
 

機関報告： 2104051  University of California - Irvine：
気候が温暖化するにつれて北極圏では落雷が2倍以上になる
An increase in lightning will drive both wildfires and warming above Arctic Circle. In 2019, the National Weather Service in Alaska reported spotting the first-known lightning strikes within 300 miles of the North Pole. Lightning strikes are almost unheard of above the Arctic Circle, but scientists published how Arctic lightning strikes stand to increase by about 100 percent over northern lands by the end of the century as the climate continues warming.

25) E. M. Gora, et al. Pantropical geography of lightning‐caused disturbance and its implications for tropical forests, Global Change Biology, 26 (9), pp. 5017-5026, 2020.
 

機関報告： 200723  Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute:
 熱帯地方では年間１億回以上の落雷がある
Researchers in Panama have published dramatic maps showing the locations of lightning strikes across the tropics in Global Change Biology. Based on ground and satellite data, they estimate that more than 100 million lighting strikes on land each year will radically alter forests and other ecosystems in the region between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn.

26) P. J. Murillo-Sandoval, et al. No peace for the forest: Rapid, widespread land changes in the Andes-Amazon region following the Colombian civil war, Global Environmental Change, 69, 2021.
 

機関報告： 210608  Oregon State University：
コロンビアの平和協定は生物学的に多様な熱帯雨林の森林破壊を増加させた
Since the end of the long-running conflict in Colombia, large areas of forest have been rapidly converted to agricultural uses, suggesting the peace agreement presents a threat to conservation the country’s rainforest. In 2016, Colombia officially signed a peace agreement ending the country’s six-decade civil war, which mainly took place within the Andes-Amazon region, an extremely biodiverse rainforest and a critical biological corridor. Some deforestation was expected after the peace accord was reached, but an analysis of 30 years of land transfers – a term used to describe changes in control and use of a parcel of land – showed a 40% increase in conversion from forest to agriculture in the post-conflict period.

27) C. C. Smith, et al. Secondary forests offset less than 10% of deforestation‐mediated carbon emissions in the Brazilian Amazon, Global Change Biology, 26 (12), pp. 7006-7020, 2020.
 

機関報告： 200928 Lancaster University：
高い期待にもかかわらず、アマゾンの森林回復によって吸収された炭素は森林破壊の排出によって矮小化されている
Regrowing forests are absorbing just a small proportion of the carbon dioxide released from widespread deforestation in the Amazon. Secondary forests – areas of new forest growing on land that has previously been deforested – form a key part of policies aiming to tackle net carbon emissions and mitigate climate change. In 2017 there were nearly 130,000 square kilometres of secondary forest in the Brazilian Amazon – roughly equivalent to the size of England.  A new study used open source MapBiomas data to map the age, extent and carbon stock of secondary forests across the Brazilian Amazon between 1986 and 2017. After calculating how much carbon had been lost through deforestation, the scientists discovered that, in more than 30 years, the regrowth of secondary forests in the Brazilian Amazon has offset less than 10 per cent of emissions from the loss of old-growth forests.

28) A. Staal, et al. Hysteresis of tropical forests in the 21st century, Nature Communications, 11 (4978), 2020.
 

機関報告： 201005 Stockholm Resilience Centre：
排出量が増えるにつれてAmazonのより多くの部分が乾燥地化する可能性がある
A larger part of the Amazon rainforest could cross a tipping point where it could become a savanna-type ecosystem than previously thought. Rainforests are very sensitive to changes that affect rainfall for extended periods. If rainfall drops below a certain threshold, areas may shift into a savanna state. In around 40 percent of the Amazon, the rainfall is now at a level where the forest could exist in either state – rainforest or savanna.

29) J. K. Green, et al. Amazon rainforest photosynthesis increases in response to atmospheric dryness, Science Advances, 6 (47), eabb7232, 2020.
 

機関報告： 201120  Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Science：
アマゾン熱帯雨林地域は考えられていたよりも気候変動（乾燥）に強い

New observational study demonstrates that increasing air dryness does not reduce photosynthesis in certain very wet regions of the Amazon rainforest, contradicting Earth System Models that show the opposite. The current Earth system models used for climate predictions show that the Amazon rainforest is very sensitive to water stress. Columbia Engineering researchers decided to investigate whether this was true, whether these forests are really as sensitive to water stress as what the models have been showing. They report their discovery that these models have been largely over-estimating water stress in tropical forests. The team found that, while models show that increases in air dryness greatly diminish photosynthesis rates in certain regions of the Amazon rainforest, the observational data results show the opposite: in certain very wet regions, the forests instead even increase photosynthesis rates in response to drier air.

30) Y. Qin, et al. Carbon loss from forest degradation exceeds that from deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, Nature Climate Change, 11, pp. 442-448, 2021.
 

機関報告： 210430  University of Exeter：
ブラジルのアマゾンは2010年代の貯蔵量よりも多くの炭素を放出した
The Brazilian Amazon rainforest released more carbon than it stored over the last decade – with degradation a bigger cause than deforestation. More than 60% of the Amazon rainforest is in Brazil, and the new study used satellite monitoring to measure carbon storage from 2010-2019. The study found that degradation (parts of the forest being damaged but not destroyed) accounted for three times more carbon loss than deforestation. Large areas of rainforest were degraded or destroyed due to human activity and climate change, leading to carbon loss.

31) L. Goldberg, et al. Global declines in human‐driven mangrove loss, Global Change Biology, 26 (10), pp. 5844-5855, 2020.
 

機関報告： 200818  NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center：
世界的なマングローブ喪失のルーツをマッピング
Study maps the roots of global mangrove loss
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2020/nasa-study-maps-the-roots-of-global-mangrove-loss
Using high-resolution data from the joint NASA-U.S. Geological Survey Landsat program, researchers have created the first map of the causes of change in global mangrove habitats between 2000 and 2016 – a valuable tool to aid conservation efforts for these vital coastline defenders. Mangroves protect the coastlines from erosion and storm damage; store carbon within their roots, trunks, and in the soil; and provide habitats for commercially important marine species. The study showed that overall, mangrove habitat loss declined during the period. However, losses from natural causes like erosion and extreme weather declined more slowly than human causes such as farming and aquaculture. The global map will benefit researchers investigating the carbon cycle impacts of mangrove gain and loss, as well as help conservation organizations identify where to protect or restore these vital coastal habitats.

32) W. R. L. Anderegg, et al. Divergent forest sensitivity to repeated extreme droughts, Nature Climate Change, 10, pp. 1091-1095, 2020.

機関報告： 201013  University of California - Santa Barbara:

さまざまな種類の森林に対する繰り返しの干ばつの影響
The effects of repeated droughts on different kinds of forests
Drought is endemic to the American West along with heatwaves and intense wildfires. But scientists are only beginning to understand how the effects of multiple droughts can compound to affect forests differently than a single drought alone. A variety of factors can increase and decrease a forest’s resilience to subsequent droughts. However, the study concluded that successive droughts are generally increasingly detrimental to forests, even when each drought was no more extreme than the initial one.

33) E. A. Ury, et al. Rapid deforestation of a coastal landscape driven by sea level rise and extreme events, Ecological Applications, 31 (5), e02339, 2021.

機関報告： 210406  Duke University：
ノースカロライナ州のゴーストフォレストを430マイル上からマッピング
Mapping North Carolina's ghost forests from 430 miles up
In bottomlands throughout the U.S. East Coast, trees are dying off as rising seas and higher storm surges push saltwater farther inland, poisoning soils far from shore. While these “ghost forests” are becoming a more common sight in North Carolina’s coastal plain, scientists had only a rough idea of their extent. Now, satellite images are providing new answers. A Duke-led team mined 35 years of satellite images of a 245,000-acre area in the state’s Albemarle-Pamlico Peninsula. The images show that, between 1985 and 2019, 11% of the area’s tree cover was taken over by ghost forests. Instead of mirroring the gradual pace of sea level rise, most of this spread occurred abruptly in the wake of extreme weather events such as hurricanes and droughts, which can concentrate salts or send them surging into the region’s interior.

34) M. Martinez & M. Ardón: Drivers of greenhouse gas emissions from standing dead trees in ghost forests, Biogeo-chemistry, 154, pp. 471-488, 2021.

機関報告： 210512 North Carolina State University
ゴーストフォレストの「排出ガス」が温室効果ガスの排出に貢献
Ghost Forest ‘Tree Farts’ Contribute to Greenhouse Gas Emissions
Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from standing dead trees in coastal wetland forests – colloquially called “tree farts” – need to be accounted for when assessing the environmental impact of so-called “ghost forests.”  While snags did not release as much as the soils, they did increase GHG emissions of the overall ecosystem by about 25 percent. The findings show snags are important for understanding the total environmental impact of the spread of dead trees in coastal wetlands, known as ghost forests, on GHG emissions.

35) B. Schuldt, et al. A first assessment of the impact of the extreme 2018 summer drought on Central European forests, Basic and Applied Ecology, 45, pp. 86-103, 2020.

機関報告：200625  University of Würzburg：
極端な気候は森林の変化を引き起こす
Climate extremes will cause forest changes
No year has been as hot and dry as 2018 since climate records began. Central European forests showed severe signs of drought stress. Mortality of trees triggered in 2018 will continue for several years. Until now, 2003 was considered as the driest and hottest year since the beginning of instrumental climate recording. This record can now be considered obsolete: The past five years were among the warmest in Central Europe since record, and 2018 was the most extreme one. The average temperature from April to October 2018 was on average 3.3 degrees Celsius above the long-term average and 1.2 degrees higher than in 2003. This had dramatic consequences for the forests in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

36) C. Senf & R. Seidl, Mapping the forest disturbance regimes of Europe, Nature Sustainability, 4, pp. 63-70, 2020.

機関報告： 200915  Technical University of Munich (TUM)
衛星画像でヨーロッパの森林の状態の変化を示す
Satellite images display changes in the condition of European forests
The forest canopy, the closed vegetation cover consisting of treetops, is rapidly declining. The team used satellite images, to create the first high-resolution map of canopy openings in Europes forests and reached the conclusion that the canopy of more than 36 million hectares of forest areas has been lost over the past 30 years. They have analyzed more than 30,000 satellite images and identified more than 36 million areas where large trees have given way to open spaces of young trees. This corresponds to a loss of the canopy in 17 percent of the European forests in 30 years. The reasons for the canopy openings range from regulated wood use to wind storms and forest fires. The team also found that the size of the canopy openings varied widely from area to area. For example, Sweden has the largest canopy openings (averaging almost two hectares) while Portugal has the highest number of canopy openings. Switzerland has the smallest openings with just 0.6 hectares on average (which is smaller than a soccer field) while the average size opening in Germany is 0.7 hectares and in Italy 0.75 hectares. The largest opening documented by the researchers is in Spain, where a single fire in 2012 burned 17,000 hectares.

37) G. Forzieri, et al. Emergent vulnerability to climate-driven disturbances in European forests, Nature Communications, 12 (1081), 2021.

機関報告： 210301 Max-Planck-Gesellschaft
気候変動はヨーロッパの森林を脅かす
ヨーロッパの森林の半分以上が倒木、山火事、昆虫の攻撃のリスクにさらされている可能性がある
Climate change threatens European forests
Well over half of Europe's forests are potentially at risk from windthrow, forest fire and insect attacks
In recent years, European forests have suffered greatly from extreme climate conditions and their impacts. Huge parts of Europe's forests are potentially at risk from pertubations like insect attacks.  In recent decades climate change has considerably damaged forests which have become increasingly vulnerable to disturbances. Forest structure and prevailing climate largely determine how vulnerable forests are to perturbations and vulnerability to insect infestations, especially in northern Europe. The boreal coniferous forests in cold regions and the dry forests of Iberian Peninsula are among the most fragile ecosystems.

38) German Federal Ministry for Economic and Energy, EnMAP, 2021.
 
機関報告： 人工衛星EnMAPの森林への応用  (Accessed 2021. 7. 11) 

Future EnMAP satellite data can be used to efficiently characterize the spatial distribution of forest ecosystems and provide an inventory of forest resources. Accordingly, the following main scientific tasks are considered important for forest applications:
- Map forest species distribution using hyperspectral, fused and multi-temporal data sets; explore the potential of advanced classification algorithms, texture and object information, linkages to geographic databases, etc.
- Estimate forest biomass and above-ground carbon
- Assimilate biochemical and structural forest parameters into process models
- Enhance and develop invertible vegetation canopy reflectance models for the forest environment, extract forest parameters, forest mensuration, health and risk assessment
- Investigate the viability of phenological signatures through indicators of canopy pigments and chemistry with regard to ecophysiological processes
- Develop improved optical indices to serve as bio-indicators of forest condition
- Develop forest monitoring procedures including multi-temporal and multi-sensor data to detect changes in forest quality and canopy cover, and
- Create advanced expert systems to improve the efficiency of hyperspectral information extraction in the forestry context.

39) M. Palahí, et al. Concerns about reported harvests in European forests, Nature, 592 (E15-E17), 2021.

機関報告： 210428113745  Bangor University

ヨーロッパでは森林の収穫が増えているか？
物議を醸す研究報告に疑問を投げかける自然の反応
Is forest harvesting increasing in Europe?
Nature response throws doubt on controversial study claims
Forest harvest has increased by just 6% in recent years, not 69% as reported by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre. Errors due to satellite sensitivity and natural disturbances.
Is forest harvesting increasing in Europe? Yes, but not as much as reported last July in a controversial study published in Nature. The study Abrupt increase in harvested forest area over Europe after 2015, used satellite data to assess forest cover and claimed an abrupt increase of 69% in the harvested forest in Europe from 2016. The authors, from the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC), suggested that this increase resulted from expanding wood markets encouraged by EU bioeconomy and bioenergy policies. The publication triggered a heated debate, both scientific and political, as the EU Parliament and Council were discussing the Post-2020 EU Forest Strategy. In a response published in Nature, 30 scientists from 13 European countries have discovered evidence that throws into doubt the conclusions of the JRC study. In Concerns about reported harvests in European forests, Palahí and colleagues demonstrate that the large harvest changes reported by JRC result from methodological errors. These errors relate to satellite sensitivity improving markedly over the period of assessment, as well as to changes in forests due to natural disturbances - for example drought and storm related die-back and tree-falls - being often attributed wrongly to timber harvests.

40) V. Döpper, et al. Using floristic gradient mapping to assess seasonal thaw depth in interior Alaska, Applied Vegetation Science, 24(1), e12561, 2021.

機関報告： 210302154234  University of Alaska Fairbanks

永久凍土層の深さを測定するために森林の色を使用
Scientists use forest color to gauge permafrost depth
Scientists regularly use remote sensing drones and satellites to record how climate change affects permafrost thaw rates — methods that work well in barren tundra landscapes where there’s nothing to obstruct the view. But in boreal regions, which harbor a significant portion of the world’s permafrost, obscuring vegetation can stymy even the most advanced remote sensing technology. Researchers developed a method of using satellite imagery to measure the depth of thaw directly above permafrost in boreal ecosystems. Rather than trying to peer past vegetation, they propose a unique solution that uses variations in forest color to infer the depth of permafrost beneath.