Denmark’s long-running effort to create forests on former farmland has revealed a striking trade-off between carbon storage and biodiversity. After 21 years, scientists compared naturally regenerated forests with areas deliberately planted with trees. Plantations accumulated tree biomass and captured carbon faster, while naturally colonised forests developed greater diversity and more varied ecological structures. The University…

Brünig Mega Safe, a company owned by Swiss entrepreneur Thomas Gasser, is drilling into the Alpine rocks to build 20 mega bunkers more than 100 metres underground, designed to safeguard the wealth of the super-rich. The project, being executed beneath the mountains of the Brunig Pass, near the village of Lungern, is led by the…

Restoring grazing by native large herbivores such as bison can produce sustained increases in native plant diversity In 1987, 30 bison from the Fort Riley Military Reservation were brought to Konza Prairie in Kansas. Nearly three decades later, researchers found that native plant species richness had increased by 103% at the local scale and by…

The trees that dominate one forest can be very different from those found just a few kilometres away. A study has mapped this variation across the country by examining 364 forest plots and nearly 59,000 trees representing 1,333 species. Researchers identified 495 dominant tree species that helped separate the forests into 10 distinct groups. Seven…

A fossil found in southern Brazil is giving researchers a closer look at the reptiles that lived near the beginning of the archosaur lineage, the group that would eventually include dinosaurs and crocodile-line animals. The animal has been named ‘Silescelida acristata’ and is identified as an early-diverging eucrocopodan archosauriform from the Middle Triassic. A recent…