Svalbard is a Norwegian archipelago, in the Arctic Ocean. Recently, researchers from the United Kingdom discovered fossilized tropical forest. Forest is around 380 million years old, and comes from the times when Svalbard was near the equator that time.
Hidden under your feet is an information superhighway that allows trees to communicate and help each other out. Forest ecologist Suzanne Simard and her colleagues at the University of British Columbia have made an interesting discovery: trees and plants really do communicate and interact with each other.
Nowadays, foresters cannot imagine timber valuation without the Faustmann formula. But, did Faustmann discover it really as the first one? Researcher from Natural Resources Institute in Finland found that not, as the valuation of forests was presented in the German territorial states almost 50 years before Faustmann.
Recently, I have found an interesting story about an American Mr. M.C. Davis who spent over $90 million to buy 54 thousand acres (ca. 22 thousands hectares) property in the southeastern U.S in order to convert it to the largest private conservation project east of Mississippi River. In my opinion, after 16 years since the foundation, this project shows perfectly that private ownership not only can better conserve nature, but it is also more efficient than the state ownership.
A controversial saga about selling the Hoffmann Forest by North Carolina State University, that began more than three years ago, is almost over. Last Friday, N.C. State University officials announced that they had reached an agreement with an international timberland investment company “Resource Management Service, LLC”.