7 August 2006
Tree Plantations Australia (TPA) has congratulated Planet Ark and the 350,000 volunteers who successfully planted one and a half million native trees and shrubs on both Schools Tree Day and National Tree Day on Sunday, 30 July.
TPA’s chief executive Allan Hansard said, “planting trees can provide environmental benefits for Australia’s urban and rural landscapes”.
“I also thank Planet Ark for drawing attention to the importance of trees to the Australian landscape. Trees can filter water, combat salinity, clean the air, increase the quality of water flowing into catchments, enhance biodiversity and store carbon,” said Hansard.
“Commercial afforestation also supports rural and regional communities by providing commercially viable environmental solutions to problems such as salinity and erosion.
“Through a recently announced program, Commercial Environmental Forestry (CEF), it has been possible to identify areas where trees could be established to use surface water, limit ground water recharge and thereby prevent the mobilisation of salinity from underground.
“The plantation forestry sector will continue its contribution to enhancing the Australian environment by planting the equivalent of 315,000 trees per day, while providing a sustainable wood resource for sawn timber and paper products we use every day,” said Hansard.

America's Forests Now Green Islands

America's national forests are beginning to resemble "islands" of green wilderness, increasingly trapped by an expanding sea of new houses, a forestry researcher said at the 90th annual Ecological Society of America (ESA) meeting in Montreal, Canada.
The widening circle of development around forests such as the Cleveland National Forest in Southern California is serving to block natural corridors, or wild "highways" that enable plants and wildlife to move easily between nearby forests, says Volker Radeloff, a forestry professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Radeloff analyzsd government census data on housing increases in and near all U.S. national forests between 1950 and 2000.
"(In an isolated state), a forest cannot function as well for biodiversity," says Radeloff, who conducted his analysis in collaboration with UW-Madison graduate students and the North Central Research Station of the United States Forest Service.
Radeloff's findings also highlight significant growth within the forests themselves. Between 1950 and 2000, the number of housing units within national forest boundaries increased from 500,000 to 1.5 million, an increase Radeloff largely attributes to inholdings, or parcels of forest land owned by private citizens.
In the Eastern U.S., most land was settled before national forests were established in the late 1800s. As a result, private landowners hold up to 46 percent of the land within forest administrative boundaries. Nationwide, inholders own about 17 percent of all national forest lands, Radeloff says.