Scientists have found that selective logging in the Amazon is twice as bad as people had previously thought. Selective logging is when instead of removing a whole area of trees, just a few are taken leaving the rest intact. This has gone unnoticed because previous satellites were not able to view just a few trees being taken. New technology however has now allowed scientists are allowed to see openings down to just a single tree or two. Research shows that valuable hardwoods such as mahogany is often what is illegally cut down. Although this selective process only accounts for a few trees from each area of the amazon to be taken, when added up is equally destructive to the Amazon. Studies have shown that knocking down just one tree causes significant damage to the understory in the ground, thus drying it up and making it prone for fires. Scientists were astounded by the fact that selective logging was the cause for 8,000 sq miles a year to be removed in the Amazon. The government of Brazil has found it rather difficult to enforce the laws in place against selective logging over an area as large as the Amazon so scientists hope that the satellites will be able to pinpoint where it is occurring, and then send over that information to law enforcement.

The maple trees that are mostly used for this process are rock/sugar maple, the black maple, and the red maple. Maple syrup is mostly made in Canada, and North-East parts of the United States such as Maine. The maple trees are drilled into and sap will drip down. The sap is usually collected by plastic taps and tubing in order to carry it to it’s destination. The sap is then boiled, because only 2 percent of it is sugar and the rest is water. One tree often yields 10 gallons of sap over a month and the best weather to collect sap is in temperatures below freezing at night and freezing by day.

The Giant Sequoia is the largest species of trees measured. The tree is also known as the Sequoiadendron Giganteum or the Sequoiadendron genus. In terms of volume, these trees are the largest in the world with an average height of 220 feet and an average diameter of 21 feet. They leaves of the Giant Sequoia are evergreen and grow in a spriral on the shoots. The seeds of the tree only grow in mineral soil under complete sunlight and only grow well without the competition of other seeds. The trees bark has a thickness of 3 feet which provides optimum protection against forest fires.


The largest of these trees is a tree named “General Sherman” and it is also the largest tree in terms of volume on the face of the earth. It has a volume of 52,508 cubic feet and is located in Sequoia National Park, California.

Trimming trees is not very hard, but you have to not what you’re doing to be successful and efficient at it. Trees in forests need to be trimmed more urgently because they compete over available space. Single trees have more space, and do not need to be trimmed as urgently. There are many benefits to trimming or pruning trees. It improves your trees health by getting rid of dead branches. It also stops hazardous branches from falling down and hitting people. There are also many different classes of pruning. Fine pruning is made up of small cuts that have mostly to do with aesthetics. The second option is standard pruning, this consists of larger cuts focused on improving the brand structure of the tree.

Experts have concluded that cuts on living trees should as close as possible to the parent limb and that bark lying at the end of the cut should remain. Pruning is seasonal; prune summer blooming trees in the beginning of spring before regrowth, fruit trees should be pruned during the later part of the winter to provide light to the middle of the tree, and to trim ornamental trees before blooming occurs.

Trimming can be dangerous so always secure yourself on the ladder, where a hardhat and glasses, and be sure to hire a professional if you find something to be too hard.

Researchers have found that older trees take in much faster and more efficiently then was previously known. It has been though for a long time that older trees lost their ability to accumulate carbon. Around 1995, this become much more important and data in this field was more rapidly collected. Sebastiaan Luyssaert took all this data and created an analysis. The conclusion was that older trees are better at locking away carbon then new trees. So before you cut down that huge old tree and replacing it with a new one, think again.

Forests aren’t just there to look pretty, they have a purpose. The trees in forests are extremely important because they convert carbon monoxide into oxygen. Carbon monoxide is odorless, tasteless, and colorless, but is an extremely toxic gas. As you know, oxygen is the air we breath, it is what fills up or lungs and keeps our heart pumping. Without oxyygen, the human race as we know it wouldn’t exist. One of the main problems with cutting down all these forests, is that trees are one of the tools of the few tools we have at our disposel to effectively cut down green house emissions. Simply put, the more trees the better. By using more fuel and having less trees, we are essentially asking for a death penalty. We could completely reverse this if we simply doubled the amount of trees on the face of the earth. That alone would make such a large impact, that Global Warming might not even be a threat as it is today.