The national forests in the United States span an extraordinary range of landscapes. Desert peaks, swampy coastlines, and even a tropical rainforest all fall under the authority of the U.S. Forest ...

Imagine you’re in a forest. Do you feel soft pine needles underfoot? Or perhaps droplets of rain dripping down from the understory? Is it warm and wet, or cool and dry? What does it smell like? Every ...

In the past three decades, poaching has decimated Africa’s now-critically endangered forest elephants, and as a result, their vital role as seed dispersers of many forest plants has been disrupted. A ...

Forests provide myriad benefits, including timber, wildlife attraction, local cooling and climate resilience. At the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, ecologists are testing which tree ...

In an old-growth longleaf pine savanna, the trees’ pine needles sing in the wind. Once considered forests, these landscapes in the southeastern U.S. coastal plain are open-canopied and sunny, more ...

On a brisk September morning, Brian Palik’s footfalls land quietly on a path in flickering light, beneath a red pine canopy in Minnesota’s iconic Northwoods. A mature red pine, also called Norway pine ...

There has been much global discussion about the best ways to manage Earth’s forests in an era of climate change and more frequent bushfires. In its new forest plan, the Victorian government has funded ...

Ecologist Jamie Pullen opens the earth with an orange dibble bar, a shovel-like device with a slim, cleaver-shaped tip. Then, she plucks a roughly one-foot-tall sapling from a white sack full of baby ...