forestry

Over the past year, the USDA Forest Service has been providing technical advice and assistance to the Deputy Minister for Forestry in the Bulgarian Ministry of Agriculture and Food. From July 18-30, the Forest Service hosted a six-member delegation of Bulgarian forestry officials to provide insight of the day-to-day operations in timber sales management.  The agency facilitates the participation of international visitors in a broad variety of educational and cultural exchange programs in the United States.

More than 1,300 people gathered at the Land Between The Lakes National Recreation Area in Golden Pond, Ky., during the annual Hummingbird Festival, where they learned about the ruby-throated variety and how to help them survive the long migration from the eastern U.S. and southern Canada to Mexico and Central America.

When I was a kid, there was one category for bees – “the stinging kind.” Fear of being stung wouldn’t allow me to consider variations among the swarms that patrolled playgrounds. The only thing that made bees tolerable was … the honey.

The Southwestern Region of the U.S. Forest Service worked with federal, state and local agency partners to host two fire and flood recovery workshops providing communities in Arizona affected by fires and floods with a forum to learn about available funding and technical assistance opportunities.

The workshops, held in Scottsdale and Eager, AZ, were open to individual homeowners, business owners, community leaders and affected Tribes of recent fires in Arizona.

As a disabled Vietnam Veteran, Daniel stated, “my greatest honor was having the opportunity to participate with Missing-in-Action work by returning to Vietnam and Laos assisting in recovery efforts of fellow soldiers.”

For over 15 years, Daniel has worked as a Tribal Relations Program Manager on the San Bernardino National Forest in California.  He thinks of himself as an ambassador for the forest representing the federal government working with tribes.

One in six Americans lives in hunger every day, as millions of Americans struggle to put food on the table for their families.

Traditionally, summer is a time when food banks and charities encounter decreases in donations and increases in the need for assistance.

Forests absorb carbon like a giant sponge into what scientists call a carbon sink. This fact is well known throughout the scientific community. However, what scientists weren’t sure of until now is the amount of carbon forests can store.

For years scientists knew a large amount of carbon was somehow being stored but could not identify exactly how this was done. This is because less than half of the carbon dioxide released through fossil fuel use remains in the atmosphere. The remaining carbon enters the oceans and other carbon sinks including forests.

The original slogan of the trekking group GreenXC read: Share a Ride, Tell a Story, Save a Park. Now they added and a National Forest (as in the U.S. Forest Service). This is because these young folks (all under 30), embarking on this bold transnational ride-share journey that departs July 27^th, have broadened the focus of its environmental protection campaign to include the myriad of issues facing the U.S. Forest Service and the national forest system.

One of their stops will include the USDA Forest Service, Forest Products Lab, in Madison, WI. The group will tour the world renowned lab and learn a great deal about the science of forestry. Aside from driving through many northern forests including the Gallatin, north of Yellowstone, and Mt Hood in OR, GreenXC will visit in California the oldest living and tallest trees in the world at the Inyo and Sequoia national forests respectively.

David Ferrell seems to rebound from setbacks with a vengeance.

During his first semester of college, his mother fell ill and he had to drop out to help take care of her and his four younger siblings. Back home, Ferrell met Charles Minor, a local Virginia man who would become a lifelong influence and who convinced Ferrell to sign up for the Job Corps, his foray into the U.S. Forest Service.

The Forest Service fondly remembers the contributions of  Dr. Walter A. Soboleff, a centenarian deeply revered and Tlingit elder, who died last month at the age of 102.

Located in Alaska, the Tlingit are a Native society that developed a complex hunter-gatherer culture in the temperate rainforest of the Alexander Archipelago in the Southeastern part of the state. The people in this society were the original caretakers of natural resources where the current-day Tongass National Forest exists.