The following is a guest post written by Jon Schwedler, communications manager for The Nature Conservancy’s Restoring America’s Forests program. For the past 14 years, Jon has worked on forest conservation efforts in Maryland, Virginia, Montana, New Mexico and California.

America’s forests are getting some love this Valentine’s Day.

This good news came in the form of two gifts wrapped in one announcement from the U.S. Forest Service last week. With 193 million acres, the Forest Service is the single biggest manager of forested lands in the U.S., which roughly translates to them overseeing about one in five of our country’s trees.

The first gift is that the Forest Service said it will be increasing the pace of forest restoration by 20% over the next three years. That means in 2014 they will look to restore 4.4 million acres — an area a little bit less than Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Grand Canyon National Parks put together. Not bad, eh?

The second morsel was extra love shared with 14 states, in the form of new local investments in the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program (CFLRP). This relatively new program, created in 2009, brings together folks who used to be at loggerheads over the management of our forests — industry, environmentalists, recreationists, sportsmen — to improve the health of our forests for people, water and wildlife.

Pioneering conservationist John Muir once said he could ride a horse at full gallop through the widely spaced trees of his beloved Sierra Mountains. Today in many of those same places you couldn’t even crawl through the forest. Why?

Because 100 years’ worth of putting out all natural fires has allowed our forests to become “too fat” — they’re now choked with small diameter trees and overgrown brush.

Just as being overweight is bad for people’s health, this portly forest condition also makes our forests less healthy, and less able to provide the live-giving services we rely on. For example, America’s forests store and filter half of our nation’s water supply. They also provide jobs to more than a million wood products workers.

Fat forests also have a dangerous side — they fuel huge, dangerous, costly mega-fires that burn too hot and too fast, like the ones we last year in the Southwest.

So while not exactly a box of chocolates, the Forest Service’s announcement last week to increase the pace of forest restoration was a welcome gift. We are blushing green.

The map below shows the new full list of CFLRP projects, plus the three bonus projects (projects with involvement from The Nature Conservancy are in bold). Can you feel the love?

[Click to download a larger map]

[Top image: Mirror Lake in Yosemite Valley in California. Image source: Patrick Smith.]

1. The EPA warns beach sand may contain illness-inducing bacteria. (TreeHugger)
2. Two teenagers are helping Girl Scouts end deforestation. (Grist)
3. Will global warming ruin football in the southern US? (Climate Progress)
4. Electric bicycles take on San Francisco’s famous hills. (Green)
5. Teaching students about climate change proves to be tricky for teachers. (Dot Earth)

1. School-bus-sized asteroid to buzz Earth Friday, closer than the moon. (Christian Science Monitor)
2. The world’s giant trees are declining, face a dire future due to climate change & other factors. (Mongabay)
3. NASA nearly doubled their list of confirmed planets beyond our solar system in one day. (Cosmic Log)
4. Jumping spiders hunt with deadly accuracy thanks to 3-D vision. (Wired)
5. Yosemite is having its driest winter in 30 years, forcing tourist destinations to get creative . (LA Times)

Mercury pollution — nothing to worry about if I don’t live in the rural Northeast and don’t eat tons of fish, right?

Guess again, says a new report done by the Biodiversity Research Institute (BRI) in conjunction with The Nature Conservancy. The report, “Hidden Risk,” details the wide spread and deep impacts of mercury pollution in terrestrial nature — particularly on animals such as songbirds and bats. Researchers are discovering how mercury is causing big declines in reproductive success among these species as well as physiological oddities — like developmental asymmetries and an inability of some birds to hit high notes.

And the same rain that brings mercury pollution down from the sky falls on us, too. So are these species a kind of canary in the coal mine for mercury’s effects on other vertebrates, including people? And will strict new federal standards limiting U.S. power plant pollution be enough in a world where mercury pollution is on the rise from China and other nations? I talked with two co-authors of “Hidden Risk” — BRI’s executive director, Dave Evers, and Tim Tear, the Conservancy’s director of science for New York — to find out more. (Download the report here.)

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Q: Some are going to be surprised that mercury pollution is still a problem — didn’t various agencies and industries take steps to reduce mercury emissions over the last decade in the United States? So why are high levels of mercury still a problem in many wildlife species?

DAVE EVERS:  Yes, a lot of mercury has been taken out of air pollution over the past few decades — but our understanding is growing of how just a little mercury can adversely affect wildlife and how many species have been affected. More species are being impacted than we had thought, and the toxicity of methylmercury to those species is at lower threshold levels than we ever realized.

TIM TEAR: Many of these species and many of the places affected are in people’s backyards. People used to think that mercury pollution was a problem isolated to remote areas of the Northeast. No more.

Q: So, would someone see a bird or a bat acting strangely because of mercury pollution? Or is this something that data is telling you?

EVERS: The effects are difficult to see in the field for the average observer. Mercury doesn’t create physical mutations, and an individual animal with mercury will probably die from predation first. But mercury is a neurotoxin that does impact wildlife behavior, and that behavior impacts their survival and reproduction. We focus on data to really quantify the impacts of mercury on the reproductive success of species.

For example, we quantified mercury impacts on the common loon. Common loons need to spend about 98 percent of their time on a nest incubating their eggs to have those eggs successfully hatch. We’ve quantified with over 5,000 hours of observation that loons with high mercury levels spend only 85 percent of their time incubating those eggs. So they spend less time in an incubation posture, and because of that, eggs do not hatch, and because of that, the species reproductive success goes down.

Q: Where is the mercury pollution still coming from? And what U.S. regions are of most concern? 

TEAR: Most of the research has really focused on the Northeast United States — an area that’s been really hard hit by acid rain, which makes mercury a bigger problem. But mercury pollution is happening all over the world. It comes globally from Asia as well as nationally from power plants in the Midwest to locally from waste incinerators. We’re going to need to address all sources of mercury to be successful in stopping these impacts.

Q: And in different habitats, right? Most people in the United States who know about mercury in nature know about it through warnings about the fish they eat.

EVERS:  Yes, there’s been a paradigm shift in new findings. In the past, most of the scientists assessing risk from mercury in an ecosystem would be looking at fish-eating birds and fish-eating mammals — because we knew methylmercury (the organic form of mercury) moved through the food web in aquatic organisms. But there’s been a missing link in looking at mercury in terrestrial ecosystem food webs and looking at how species that eat insects and spiders — what we call “invertivores” — can be affected.

In the invertivore food web, the key pieces are no longer fish, but spiders. A bird that eats a spider that ate a spider that ate a fly — that’s four different changes in the trophic food web. We’ve established that a little songbird like a northern waterthrush or a sparrow that eats spiders can actually be higher up in the food web than a bald eagle, which eats fish — and so that songbird has more mercury in its body than does the eagle.

TEAR: We’ve also discovered that mercury is in many more food webs than we realized.  It is not just in lakes and ponds. It’s in our forests, our estuaries; it’s in the lowlands and on the mountaintops. It’s in the spiders in the Adirondacks, and it’s in backyard birds in New York City.

Q:  You mentioned effects on reproductive success. What are some of the other impacts of mercury on terrestrial wildlife?

EVERS:  For example, bird song is affected. Two recent studies show that birds with high mercury can’t hit the high notes, and their songs are simplified. I also worry about long-distance migration, because high mercury has been shown to affect the symmetry of development. If a bird’s left wing is 5 percent different in shape than its right wing, that bird is going to fly in a crooked way to compensate for it, which requires more energy to make a flight of thousands of miles to its wintering area. Ultimately, that’s going to affect its survival.

Q: That’s sad. But ultimately, why should humans care?

TEAR: First, if you care about the environment and you care about birds and bats and bugs, then you should care that many of these animals are being heavily impacted.

But the second answer is that the neurotoxic rain that contains mercury falls on humans as well as wildlife. We already know that mercury can be a big problem in human health. This research establishes that the effects of mercury are happening all over the planet, all over many habitat types, to vertebrate species other than ourselves. So people should be concerned about these effects, because there’s a link between human health and ecosystem health.

Q:  Back to the science of this. How the heck do you measure mercury in a bird population, anyway?

EVERS:  It’s actually very simple and straightforward.  There are nice and easy ways to capture and/or take samples from an individual bird that are quick and are non-harmful to the bird and do very little disruption to its routine, other than just having it in a net or hand for a half hour or so. We take a blood sample — just a drop does the trick. We also can take a feather sample, which gives us more of a long-term picture of how much mercury has come into that individual over time.

Q: But how do you disentangle the effects of mercury on birds and bats from other factors? How do you know that it’s mercury that is causing the decline of the wood thrush or the little brown bat?

EVERS: It’s a question we’re still studying. There are multiple stressors at play for many species and habitats, and as conservation biologists, we are trying to understand those. We want to provide scientific information to landscape managers and policymakers, so we will have these birds around for a few more hundred years at least.

Take the olive-sided flycatcher. In the last 4 years, it’s declined by 80 percent, so 80 percent of this population is gone in comparison to 4 years ago. It’s a bird that lives in bogs.  Bogs are known to have high methylation rates of mercury, but they are not well studied as a habitat whatsoever. Neither is the olive-sided flycatcher. So here you have a species in a habitat that I think is at great risk to mercury as a potential driver and a primary stressor for why this decline is happening.  Mercury is an omnipresent stressor, but the question is always: Where is it a primary stressor?

TEAR:  I’d also add that, in some places where birds are declining, there has been no obvious habitat change, and many people think of the challenges as being primarily habitat loss, but we certainly know that, for example, some species like the wood thrush within the Adirondack Park, there are fewer wood thrush today than there were 20 years ago. They’re still there, but there aren’t as many.  The question is why, and this is part of the disentangling of those different stressors that Dave is referring to.

Q:  Is there any relationship between mercury emissions and greenhouse gas emissions? Is there a climate change connection?

TEAR: Well, many of the greenhouse gases like carbon dioxides and other air pollutants — such as nitrogen and sulfur, which cause acid rain, and mercury, which brings us this neurotoxic rain — come from power plants, and all of these air pollutants have negative impacts on our environment. Our research shows that we should be factoring in these ecological impacts when we consider the cost and benefits of regulatory programs such as the recent Mercury and Air Toxics Standards Rule. But so far, estimating the ecological impact of these air pollutants that are coming from similar sources as CO₂ has not been done.

EVERS:  Climate change might also be causing great mercury methylation rates into ecosystems or even remobilizing mercury that was stored in the system. For instance, forest fires have become more predominant because of climate change in some parts of the country — and those forests hold a lot of legacy mercury in their systems, which can be released quite rapidly with a fire. Greater storm intensity and frequency could be increasing deposition of mercury from the global atmospheric pool to landscapes below. Increased wetting and drying cycles could be another factor in greater mercury methylation.

Q: It sounds dire. So what can anyone do?

TEAR:  First, while we need more research on this, there are definitely landscape and wildlife management actions that might help reduce the amount of mercury embedded in the environment.

Dave mentioned that hotter forest fires that occur for whatever reason can release a great deal more mercury than cooler burns — so using fire management in our forest systems could have a significant impact on the amount of mercury that’s released. How we manage artificial reservoirs is extremely important — if we manage those in a way to make the wetting and drying cycles greater, we might also be increasing the amount of mercury methylation.

EVERS: Another example: It makes a lot of sense not to log in a riparian area anyway—and it also makes sense from a mercury standpoint. There is a lot of legacy mercury and even new mercury coming into these forest ecosystems, and the less we disturb that mercury the better. There are studies right now quantifying the mercury effects of logging practices in Oregon.

Q: What else?

TEAR: We need greater investment in this country’s mercury monitoring network. A stronger network would help us gather data systematically and also help us know whether current efforts to reduce mercury pollution — like the EPA’s recent Mercury and Air Toxics Rule standard — are enough to improve these areas already damaged by mercury.

We also need continued research on this issue. We’re just beginning to understand the impacts of mercury on both ecological and human health. And we need to support efforts at all levels to reduce mercury — global, regional and local. Mercury is coming from multiple levels, and no single level will be enough.

EVERS: On the importance of a national network — I’ve been fortunate to work with both U.S. Senate and House representatives to introduce bills that would establish the first national mercury monitoring network, which we need from a federal accountability standpoint. But industry also has been supportive of this idea. Industry likes certainty, and a national monitoring network could really help provide a standard playing field for the industry in terms of installing emission protections on their smokestacks.

And a national monitoring network could also help the United States politically wrangle with other countries where mercury emissions are increasing. About 50 percent of mercury emissions have been taken out of U.S. sources between 1990 and 2005 — but the global pool of mercury continues to increase because countries like China are putting in a new coal-fired power plant once a week. A standardized mercury monitoring program provides us the way to really track our progress both spatially and temporally.

(Image: Wood thrush. Image credit: Dave Whitlock/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)

Mark Tercek is the president and CEO of The Nature Conservancy. This post was originally published for the The Huffington Post.

As we watch the world debate how best to address climate change, and as carbon emissions continue to soar, at least one climate strategy strikes me as a “no-brainer.” We should do everything we can to save the world’s forests.

There are many good reasons for protecting forests, from their intrinsic beauty to their ecologic and economic values. Tropical forests are storehouses of biodiversity, harboring more than one-half of the Earth’s known plants and animal species. And nearly 1 billion people worldwide directly depend on forest resources — fiber, fuel, food and clean water — for their livelihoods and well-being.

Forest destruction produces about 15 percent of the world’s manmade global carbon emissions — more carbon pollution than the entire global transportation sector. It is the primary source of emissions in two of the top five carbon-emitting countries: Brazil and Indonesia. Forests function as a natural air conditioner, pulling carbon from the atmosphere while cleaning and cooling our air. Yet each year more than 32 million acres of the world’s forests are destroyed — an area about the size of New York state.

The figures speak for themselves. When done right, reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (known as “REDD+” in policymakers’ jargon) can be a triple win for nature, people and our world’s climate.

But REDD+ does have its critics. As head of The Nature Conservancy, it’s easy for me to explain why my organization wants to reduce deforestation. However, some question why we support another part of the REDD+ equation–improving forest management for the sustainable harvesting of wood. Why create incentives for cutting down trees?

Again, let’s turn to the numbers. Destructive logging practices, many of them illegal, are one of the most serious drivers of forest loss and resulting emissions. Research has shown that that transitioning from destructive logging to low impact harvesting practices can reduce damage to forests and lower carbon emissions by 30-50% while delivering the same supply of timber. Simply put, better forestry can be good for our climate.

In addition, encouraging smart replanting where logging has already occurred is an important part of keeping forests viable in the long term — for local communities, forest-dwelling species and future generations.

Finally, we also recognize that forestry activities today sustain millions of jobs around the world and provide people with wood and paper products. Recycling and development of non-timber alternatives can — and should — reduce demand for these goods, but well-managed forests and plantations also play an important role. They can provide a reliable, sustainable supply of paper and wood while diverting pressure away from pristine lands that contain the highest amount of carbon and serve as homes for endangered species and indigenous communities. And many of the world’s best-quality forests are managed by indigenous communities, who tend their land in low-impact ways while relying on its bounty for their livelihoods.

“Well-managed” is the operative phrase. Robust and transparent standards, accounting rules and independent verification must protect against converting primary forests to plantations under REDD+ programs that allow for planting and managing forests for the sustainable harvesting of wood. In fact, the Cancun Agreements adopted by 194 countries at the December 2010 UN climate convention require that REDD+ actions be “consistent with the conservation of natural forests and biological diversity, ensuring that the actions … of this decision are not used for the conversion of natural forests.”

Based on our 60 years of experience conserving forests around the world, The Nature Conservancy is committed to demonstrating how REDD+ can work to provide benefits for forests, local people and the global climate. For example, in Indonesia, we are partnering with the government in the district of Berau to protect its tropical forest and reduce carbon pollution by two million tons annually — which is like removing roughly 400,000 cars from the road each year. In this 5 million-acre area, we are also boosting economic progress by providing guidance on smarter, more sustainable farming and logging techniques. And we’re doing on-the-ground research to understand how much carbon pollution we’re preventing from going into the atmosphere.

REDD+ alone will not solve the climate change challenge — we must urgently address carbon pollution from all sources. But REDD+ is a critical piece of the puzzle in addressing this global challenge, and it has the potential to be transformative in benefiting communities, ecosystems, biodiversity and the global climate.

(Image: Rainforest in East Kalimantan, Indonesia. Image credit: ©Jez O’Hare)

In Chinese culture, the number five is generally held to be a lucky number. That’s due in large part to the Wu Xing, or Five Elements: water, wood, metal, earth and fire.

It’s fitting, then, that when we took stock of what the Conservancy accomplished here in China throughout the course of 2011, we were especially proud of five landmark conservation accomplishments. And, as it turns out, we batted for the elemental cycle.

Water
In an unprecedented effort that saw the largest power station in the world alter its practices for ecological purposes, the Conservancy worked with the Three Gorges Dam to restore declining downstream carp populations. By helping to guide the release of excess water, the Conservancy and partners sought to mimic natural river cycles that trigger breeding in local carp species, which have experienced devastating decreases in the last few decades. Early returns suggest that the water release resulted in higher levels of carp spawning, offering a bit of good news along a stretch of the Yangtze in bad need of it.

Wood
Well, there’s about to be much more of it: the Conservancy is leading Sichuan’s largest forest carbon project which will restore more than 40 square kilometers of forest in the province’s southwestern Liangshan region. In 2011 alone, we helped plant 1.2 million trees, and over the next four years we’ll plant a total of 10 million. These reforestation efforts will create jobs for local people, deliver measurable climate change results through accredited carbon credit programs and protect endangered wildlife, including species like the giant panda.

Metal
Speaking of pandas, small metal boxes containing motion-sensor cameras captured incredible images of wild animals in Sichuan Province. And these photos aren’t just revealing the region’s unrivaled richness in wildlife but are also providing invaluable resources for increasing our understanding of the natural world. Located on a parcel of land that will soon become one of China’s first forays into private land conservation, the Conservancy candid cameras photographed over 30 species of birds and mammals, including golden monkeys, takins, leopard cats, golden pheasants and pandas. One of the pandas was even caught eating meat, providing landmark visual evidence of the panda’s omnivorous appetite.

Earth
In even more panda news, the Conservancy and partners developed a new methodology that will allow bamboo reforestation to be classified as a clean development mechanism (CDM) activity. This news comes hot on the heels of China’s first domestic voluntary carbon market called the Panda Standard, and will for the first time allow conservationists to quantify carbon sequestration in bamboo sinks, which are currently ineligible in other carbon accounting methodologies. Bamboo is one of China’s most widely grown and harvested plants, meaning that the Panda Standard could play a huge role in restoring forested landscapes and accelerating China’s carbon economy.

Fire
And we go out with a bang. When the Conservancy celebrated its 60th anniversary in Washington, DC earlier this year, Board of Directors member Jack Ma made an explosive announcement. Ma, one of China’s leading entrepreneurs, announced the China Global Conservation Fund, a new project that will significantly expand the Conservancy’s global reach. The fund is being established by a group of philanthropic Chinese to channel millions of dollars toward high-impact conservation projects around the world. The first project to receive support from the fund will be an initiative to save Kenya’s critically endangered hirola antelope.

And now, as we leave the Year of the Rabbit, these five projects leave us well positioned to expand on our success and enjoy an even more prosperous Year of the Dragon. Good luck and good fortune in 2012.

(Images: Panda eating meat captured by motion sensor cameras stationed on the Motianling County Land Trust Reserve in northern Sichuan. Image credit: TNC. Harvesting bamboo for basket production in Yunnan Province, China. © Ami Vitale.)

Pandas are vegetarians, right? Well, new findings by Conservancy scientists suggest the issue isn’t as black and white (or, er, as green and blood red) as once thought.

Motion sensor cameras were set up this summer in the soon-to-be established Motianling County Land Trust Reserve in northern Sichuan by The Nature Conservancy, Peking University and local government partners. In November they captured images of a giant panda consuming the carcass of a takin, a Himalayan goat-antelope. These photos provide visual confirmation that pandas at least occasionally eat meat in addition to their customary staple of bamboo leaves. (See the amazing images captured by remote camera.)

While this isn’t news to scientists — evidence in feces has shown that pandas do sometimes eat meat — very few photos exist of a panda actually consuming it.

But the panda’s no killer; scientists confirmed that the takin had died of natural causes several days before it was discovered by the panda. “These images show that there is still so much we don’t know about their behavior,” says Zhao Peng, the Motianling project lead for the Conservancy. “They really are an incredible species.”

But the question remains: Is the panda portrayed in Kung Fu Panda closer to real life than the cuddly ball of fur we all love and adore? To get to the bottom of this question we reached out to Matt Durnin, the Conservancy’s Asia-Pacific Conservation Science Director. Matt has been studying pandas for more than a decade and conducted his Ph.D. research on the wild giant pandas of the Wolong Nature Reserve in Sichuan province.

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Q: Where did the researchers find this panda, and what were they investigating with their camera traps?

Matt Durnin: The work is being conducted in the Motianling Land Trust Reserve a 110km2 area in Pingwu County, Sichuan Province. The reserve is a vital, healthy habitat for conservation target species including the endangered giant panda, and is adjacent to two existing giant panda reserves – Baishuijiang and Tangjiahe National Nature Reserves.

We use remote cameras as a “non-invasive” way to monitor species presence in the reserve. Remote cameras are a now widely used and well proven methodology to gather information not only on the presence of species but — as is evidenced in these photos — on behavior (e.g. feeding or scent marking).

In previous work done on giant pandas in the wild, I was able to capture photos of pandas at “scent trees,” sniffing the scent of other pandas as well as leaving their own scent on trees. Remote cameras have also been used to identify the presence of previously unknown species or species that have been considered extirpated from an area.

Q: Was this news a surprise to you?

Matt Durnin: This news is not so much a surprise because researchers have previously found the remains of animals in panda feces. But it is exciting and significant. I’ve only ever heard of one other incident of a panda being photographed on a carcass and those photos have never been published and were taken with a mobile phone.

What makes these photos significant is the number and quality of them, as well as the systematic way in which they were obtained. Researchers came across the carcass (so were able to estimate how long since its death) and placed the camera there to photograph any animals that might come along and feed on it. I don’t think anyone expected that it would be a panda but rather some other carnivore. This is a panda feeding on a carcass over a 6-hour period; it’s the most extensive photographic footage of a panda in the wild doing so.

Q: What can you learn from these photos? How common is meat-eating in pandas, and is something new happening here that might be increasing the behavior?

Matt Durnin: Pandas are technically carnivores. And we know from finding feces in the field that contained animal remains — as well as anecdotally from conversations with locals living and spending time in panda habitat — that they do eat meat from time to time. So this is not a “new” behavior — but it is, we believe, very uncommon. So documenting it with such a large number of high quality photos is an important result of this research.

From the photographs we have what appears to be a very healthy panda (it’s not possible to say if it’s a male or female) feeding for approximately 6 hours on the remains of a takin. There is plenty of its primary food, bamboo, in the area. So we can assume it was not starving from lack of access to bamboo but rather it was hungry, found a “fresh” carcass and so did what carnivores do and ate the meat.

However, there is only a small amount of data supporting that wild pandas do eat meat, so we still consider this a rare behavior. I’ve collected hundreds — perhaps thousands — of feces for DNA and bite-fragment analysis in my research over the years and have found only one feces with anything other than bamboo in it.

These 600 photos tell us that, despite decades of research on pandas in the wild, we’re still learning.

Q: When most people think of panda bears, they think of sweet, seemingly cuddly creatures. Is that popular image true to the facts, or do pandas have a not-so-cuddly side as well?

Matt Durnin: The famous field biologist George Schaller was once chased and climbed a tree to get away from a female panda that he was observing. Just like any large carnivore, they have very powerful jaws, sharp teeth and claws — if they were to get a hold of a person or other animal, they could do a lot of harm. Zookeepers and zoo guests (that have jumped into enclosures or stuck their arms through cage bars) have been injured and mauled to death by captive pandas. Whlie there’s no evidence that anyone has ever been killed by a panda in the wild, they are wild animals — they are extremely strong — and if threatened can be as lethal as any other large carnivore out there. They are also, despite most people’s image, very fast albeit in short bursts.

However, like most wild animals they do whatever they can to avoid humans and the chances of someone being mauled by a panda are infinitesimally small.

Another little known fact is that their fur is quite bristly and not at all soft as many imagine.

Q: This takin was already dead when the panda started eating it. Given the photos, do you think it’s possible a panda would kill an animal for meat if it were hungry enough?

Matt Durnin: I believe if a panda had to it could catch and kill prey, but it’s not designed for long-distance running. So pandas would need to do any “hunting” by waiting and ambushing a passing animal.

However, in the early 1980s, there was a huge bamboo die-off in a large area of Sichuan inhabited by pandas. If there was ever a time for pandas to resort to hunting prey, it would have been then. But as far as I know, there is no evidence any did so, even though in theory they are capable. So there’s no evidence that they hunt and kill their own prey.

The evidence we have shows that when they do eat meat, it’s carrion.

Q: This panda was photographed on a land trust reserve — the first organized form of private land conservation in China. The United States has certainly had a long history of private land conservation, but not so in China. What can these private initiatives add to China’s nature reserve system?

Matt Durnin: The nature reserve system in China, again as in many places around the world, is sorely underfunded. So tapping into the potential that “private initiatives” have is critical to successful conservation in China.

The overall goal of this project is to overcome existing barriers (lack of funding being one of the biggest barriers) to effective conservation in China by introducing the land trust model, which enables participation by all sectors of society (non-government as well as government) in protecting critical lands while also incorporating sustainable development opportunities for struggling local communities.

The land trust model is a “new” concept to not only China, but much of Asia. Research findings like this help us gain support for piloting this new model.

(Image: Panda eating meat captured by motion sensor cameras stationed on the Motianling County Land Trust Reserve in northern Sichuan. Image credit: TNC. View more photos from the remote camera here.)

The following is a guest post written by Jon Schwedler, communications manager for The Nature Conservancy’s Restoring America’s Forests program. For the past 14 years, Jon has worked on forest conservation efforts in Maryland, Virginia, Montana, New Mexico and California.

Was 2011 the year of mega-fire? The answer to that question depends where you live.

If you live in the American Southwest, 2011 indeed was the year of fire for you. Arizona, New Mexico and Texas all had record fires. The “mega-fires” in these states burned an area larger than New Jersey.

If the last seven years is any measure, these extreme fire events could become the new normal at a national scale. Indeed, the five biggest fire years in U.S. history have all come since 2004 (which includes 2011 — the 4th biggest year).

[Image: Only five years have more than eight million acres burned in the United States; all have occurred since 2004, including 2011.]

Why? And more importantly, what can be done?

First, in talking about mega-fires it is important to understand the context of what is “natural.” Prior to European colonization, wildfires sparked by lightning and Native Americans were common (Native Americans often used fire to encourage new plant growth as grazing areas for game). Fire experts tell us that more than two-thirds of North America’s forests and grasslands burned regularly — at least once every 30 years.

Thus, over many thousands of years, America’s outdoors evolved with low-intensity, recurrent wildfire. Indeed, many of our natural areas actually need fire just as much as they need water.

But today a perfect storm of events has pushed forest conditions past their tipping point, and created an uncharacteristic plague of mega-fires that burn too big, too hot and too fast.

First, Smokey Bear has done too good a job. A century of suppressing all fires has created an incredible backlog of overgrown brush in our forests. For example, one hundred years ago noted conservationist John Muir described being able to gallop a horse through the Sierra Nevada’s wide-open forests; today it would be difficult to even crawl through these same places.

Second, changing temperatures have simultaneously dried out forests and extended the living season for bugs that weaken our trees. When colder temperatures come later in the year, or don’t go low enough, these insects buy more time to eat, breed and damage forests.

The result today is a tinderbox of weakened forests about the size of Montana. The fires we’ve had since 2004 are a symptom of this cause, 100 years in the making.

But, ironically, part of the solution is more fire.

Not the kind of mega-fires we’ve seen this year, but rather much smaller controlled burns that are purposely planned, set and managed by the fire professionals in the U.S. Forest Service, state and local forest agencies and The Nature Conservancy. These “prescribed burns” remove overgrown brush in our forests, reducing the woody fuel that creates conditions for dangerous and costly accidental fires. The Nature Conservancy performed controlled burns on more than 130,000 acres of our own land last year.

Another thing we can do is actively thin some of our forests in overgrown areas so they can be healthier, which will provide benefits to people, water and wildlife.

A new federal program that invests in just these kinds of projects, the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program (CFLRP), has already shown great results in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington. And besides lowering the risk of mega-fire, this program has also helped create or maintain more than 1,550 jobs.

Fortunately it looks like Capitol Hill is paying heed to this kind of success. In the 2012 budget Congress has fully invested in CFLRP, which means more communities will share its benefits.

On a personal level each of us can also pitch in, by being smarter about how and where we build our communities, and make our properties “firewise.”

While the smoke of 2011 has cleared, for many the mega-fires of 2011 will remain burned into memory. If we are able to fully embrace long-term investments in healthy forests, hopefully that’s where these mega-fires will stay.

[Image: 2011’s historic Wallow Fire in Arizona's Apache Sitgreaves National Forest. Image credit: Jayson Coil, US Forest Service]

Jack Hurd is the director of the Asia-Pacific Forest Program for The Nature Conservancy.

When I arrived in Bangkok in 1988, freshly armed with a bachelor’s degree in economics and what my parents felt was a misguided notion that I might find employment in Southeast Asia, I didn’t know anything about Burma. However, almost immediately, two events sparked my curiosity.

In August of that year, the military government in Burma launched an aggressive crackdown on students and workers demonstrating in the capital city of Rangoon for greater political freedom and enhanced economic opportunity. Over the following months, thousands of people streamed to the border with Thailand seeking safety from the long arm of an oppressive regime, providing new energy to a civil war that had been waged by ethnic minorities since 1948.

Then, in November, massive flooding in southern Thailand put an end to logging the country’s natural forests. Thai businessmen and their enablers in the military began to seek out timber in neighboring countries, and truckloads of ancient Teak trees crossed the border from Burma at unprecedented rates, leaving in their wake a deteriorating natural environment and worsening civil conflict.

While there were plenty of other things going on in the region at this time, the stories that emerged along the Thai-Burma border — both tragic and hopeful — seemed to dominate the news cycle for years. The social, political, economic and environmental dimensions of these issues hooked me as I embarked on a career in sustainable forestry.

Over the following 20-plus years, I read extensively about the country and its culture, its politics and its people, its natural resources and its historical record. I visited the capital on several occasions, traveled around the country a bit and joined Burma-focused events in Bangkok, Washington D.C. and Seattle.

While my engagement with Burmese affairs waxed and waned, a single question remained in my mind, and in the minds of countless others in the region and around the world: when will events conspire to let the country reassert its natural position in the heart of Asia? Interestingly, that time may be now.

The last year has seen rapid changes taking place across the country. Elections were held in 2010 and, while widely condemned as a sham, they signaled willingness on the part of the generals who ruled the country to trade in their khaki uniforms for business suits. First, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi was released from the house arrest she had endured on and off since 1989, and her political party, the National League for Democracy, indicated a willingness to re-engage in the political process, having boycotted the 2010 elections.

Not long ago, construction on the massive and massively controversial Myitsone Dam in the northern state of Kachin — which was being built by Chinese-backed firms in order to provide electricity to that country’s Yunnan Province — was suspended in the wake of significant national and international protest.

Additionally, a series of high-ranking officials from Europe and North America visited the country to hold talks with the new leaders. That group included Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the highest-ranked U.S. official to visit in more than 50 years.

And finally, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) — a 10-country club to which Myanmar (as Burma is now known) belonged but was not universally welcomed — expressed its support for Myanmar to assume the association’s rotating presidency in 2014. These are all significant developments that pave the way for greater engagement with international businesses, UN Specialized Agencies, international financial institutions like the World Bank, and NGOs.

Significant international attention for Myanmar has been a long time coming, and it remains unclear if this is yet another false summit. But, if outside support for Myanmar is prolonged, it could reshape the future for a long-suffering people, a stagnant economy and the country’s abundant natural resources. More about that soon.

(Image: Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon, Burma. Source: WikiMedia Commons.)

1. Festive infographic calculates Santa’s carbon footprint. (TreeHugger)
2. The proof is in the photos: Chilean glacier shrinks half a mile in 12 months. (Mother Nature Network)
3. Warming temperatures drive polar bears to cannibalism. (BBC)
4. Half of all vehicles will be hybrids by 2040. (Green Tech)
5. Deforestation rates in Africa are accelerating. (Environmental News Service)