NASA posted a map detailing the “Aboveground Woody Biomass” in the continental United States (in other words, trees).

Josef Kellndorfer and Wayne Walker of the Woods Hole Research Center (WHRC) recently worked with colleagues at the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Geological Survey to create such an inventory for the United States. The map above was built from the National Biomass and Carbon Dataset (NBCD), released in 2011. It depicts the concentration of biomass—a measure of the amount of organic carbon—stored in the trunks, limbs, and leaves of trees. The darkest greens reveal the areas with the densest, tallest, and most robust forest growth.

Over six years, researchers assembled the national forest map from space-based radar, satellite sensors, computer models, and a massive amount of ground-based data. It is possibly the highest resolution and most detailed view of forest structure and carbon storage ever assembled for any country.

Forests in the U.S. were mapped down to a scale of 30 meters, or roughly 10 computer display pixels for every hectare of land (4 pixels per acre). They divided the country into 66 mapping zones and ended up mapping 265 million segments of the American land surface. Kellndorfer estimates that their mapping database includes measurements of about five million trees.

Since I live in the greener part of Appalachia, this explains why I went to Colorado and expected to be really impressed with the Rockies, but was puzzled at the lack of trees. Link -via Buzzfeed

If you love Harry Potter, then you’d better celebrate your geek-interests with your own great golden snitch ornaments. They seem pretty easy to make as long as you just have a golden glass ornament, some tissue paper, wire and glitter -that means you could have tons of them on your tree if you want.

Link via Craftzine

Living in Southern California, I regrettably miss most of the traditional signs of changing seasons. For that reason, I’m always particularly struck by the beauty of forests of deciduous trees changing colors and shedding their leaves. If you’re also a huge fan of these sights, be sure to head over to BuzzFeed where you can enjoy 21 of these stunning images.

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I know you guys like tree houses based on how many of you comment every time we share links like this, so I’m really happy to get to share this great collection of tree houses with you guys. Which one is your favorite? I like the middle one on the bottom row of the pics above.

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Dark Roasted Blend has an amazing collection of stunning and interesting trees right now, including the African tulip tree above, which is apparently very invasive. With a tree that pretty though, I don’t think I’d mind if it took over my whole neighborhood. How about you?

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Baubotanik, or botanic architecture is the art and science of creating structures out of growing plants. A program at the University of Stuttgart in Germany explores the possibilities of this new architecture.

The architects begin with stabilizing elements—iron rings, polyester bands, steel grids—and environmentally-appropriate plants that are designed to grow around the armature, becoming stronger at structurally-critical junctures. “Plants have learned to carry heavy loads,” says Ferdinand Ludwig, the team’s biologist and botanist. “We want to explore what is possible when trees are re-thought as building support structures.” After a period of natural growth, the reinforcing elements can be removed, and the structure is comprised entirely of plant elements. By leveraging the “constructive intelligence” of organic forms, Baubotanik architects have designed a pedestrian bridge, a bird-watching house, and a willow pavilion.

Read more about these projects at Garden Design. Link -Thanks, Claire!

By implanting the gold nanoparticles into the leaves of the Bacopa caroliniana plants, the scientists were able to induce the chlorophyll in the leaves to produce a red emission. Under a high wavelength of ultraviolet light, the gold nanoparticles were able to produce a blue-violet fluorescence to trigger a red emission in the surrounding chlorophyll.[...]

“In the future, bio-LED could be used to make roadside trees luminescent at night. This will save energy and absorb CO2 as the bio-LED luminescence will cause the chloroplast to conduct photosynthesis,” Dr. Yen-Hsun Su said in an interview with Chemistry World.

Link via Popular Science | Photo (unrelated) by Flickr user Irargerich used under Creative Commons license

The cannonball tree bears fruit that is shaped like a cannonball. When these 10-inch spheres fall from above and hit the ground, they crack open with a sound like a cannon firing.

The tree (scientific name Couroupita guianensis is native to the south of the Caribbean and to the northern parts of South America. Yet it has also been growing in India for at least two to three thousand years and the jury is out whether it is native there or somehow the trees were transported across the continents several thousand years ago.

Link via The Presurfer | Photo by Flickr user xordroyd used under Creative Commons license

Deep into one of the 350 remaining cork oak forests  (in my case Herdade dos Fidalgos, near Lisbon) sometime between June and August you’ll suddenly come across a team of about 20 men, ranging in ages from 16 to 70, striking huge twisted trees with axes. Then, with a sensitivity you would not associate with an axe, they prise the juicy bark from the tree and it is levered from the trunk in great, satisfying pieces. From the base, right up to the beginning of the branches, it is peeled away to reveal the oak’s red, nude surface underneath.

When the tree is completely harvested, the axeman takes a swig from his water barrel and moves on to the next. Periodically, a truck comes to collect the pieces of cork and take them to nearby sheds where they will be weathered for months before being processed. The truck is the only obvious exception to a process that hasn’t changed since the 18th century, when montados (open cork oak woodlands) and forests here in Portugal, in southern Spain, Morocco, Algeria and Turkey began to be exploited commercially to produce wine corks. A white number is painted on the tree. It will be nine years before it’s disturbed again.

Link -via TYWKIWDBI

(Image credit: Katherine Rose/the Observer)

What a thrill it would be to turn over a page every month and find a new picture of a goat in a tree! You could have that delightful experience in 2011 with the Goats in Trees calendar. Link -via Breakfast Links

One tree + four mirrors = an entire forest! Step into a small booth and experience an infinite number of trees. This installation by DUS Architects was shown to folks in Oosterdokskade, Amsterdam last month. Link -via Metafilter

(Image credits: Pieter Kers)

YouTube link.

In 1987 this Canadian production won the Academy Award for the Best Animated Short Film, and in 1994 was voted by animation artists to be one of the 50 Greatest Cartoons of all time.  Embedded above is part 2 of three parts, which demonstrates the style and representative content of the film.  Those who are interested will of course want to view Part 1 and Part 3.  This English version is narrated by Christopher Plummer.

Wired has a gallery of twelve trees from all over the world that have outlived everything around them. The oldest started life at least 80,000 years ago, but may be much older! The tree shown is the Llangernyw Yew in Wales, which is only three to four thousand years old, but is one of the prettiest trees in the collection. Link

Previously at Neatorama: 10 Most Magnificent Trees in the World

You may well be thinking ‘The mystery of what?’ but resin (the type from trees) is still something of a mystery. The jury is still out about why exactly plants secrete (or excrete, depending on what side of the argument you are on) the sticky oozy stuff on which you may well have at some point inadvertantly put your hand or your clothes while taking a stroll through the woods. Plus at the right time it looks simply amazing, especially with insects inside it.

Some plants produce explosive resin. The Jeffrey Pine of California produces resin which is highly volatile – that mean it has, under the right circumstances – a tendency to vaporize. When people tried to distil it in nineteenth century America, they thought it was Ponderosa Pine resin. A number of distilleries exploded as a result of this mis-classification and the mistake was put right in something of a hurry. The reason behind the explosion was that the Jeffrey Pine resin was made up largely of pure heptanes – highly flammable. Distillation of Jeffrey Pine resin continues to be very dangerous to this day but the denizens of California have managed to get it right since the great pine explosions of 1852.

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From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by taliesyn30.

Illustrator Christoph Niemann looks at the identification of leaves in a whole new way. See a collection of leaves from trees you never knew existed, like the Fast Forwood and the Alder Ego. Link -via Swiss Miss

“The format… was that of a box or casket, the raw materials for which were provided by the specimen itself, made up in the form of a book – varying in size from folio to duodecimo – with the ‘front cover’ forming a sliding lid…

For the left side of the ‘volume’ mature wood was selected and for the right side sapwood, while the fore-edge was made from heartwood; the top surface incorporated cross-sections from branches of various ages while the bottom surface showed a section through the trunk…

While the box itself served to illustrate the characteristics of the timber, the interior was reserved for an exposition of the whole natural history of the plant… a complete seedling is included to one side, with its roots, seminal capsule and first pair of leaves.  In the centre of the box the tip of a branch displays buds and leaves in various stages of development…blossoms are shown varying from full blooms to faded flowers, while fruits are similarly represented at every stage in their development… Examples of associated parasites and lichens are included…”

The empress Catherine tried to purchase Schildbach’s collection, but he deeded it to his master, Landgrave Wilhelm IX; it now resides in the Naturalienkabinett in Kassel, where it is still used as reference material.  Schildbach inspired several imitators, including Candid Huber, a Benedictine monk, whose collection survives in the Bavarian Burgmuseum.  Peter the Great eventually acquired a collection for his Kunstkamera in St. Petersburg, and another resides in the Musee National des Techniques of the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers in Paris.

The cited text above is excerpted from Chapter IV (“Museums and the Natural World”) in Curiosity and Enlightenment: Collectors and Collections from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century, by Arthur MacGregor (Yale Univ. Press, New Haven, 2007) – a comprehensive history of cabinets of curiosities, museums, and specialized collections.

Small-format photos of Schildbach’s collection are available at the webpage of the Naturkundemuseum in the Ottoneum at Kassel.  The embedded photo is from a similar Holzbuch in a collection at the Landschaftsverband Westfalen-Lippe.  Other examples may be seen here and here.  The creation of such “wooden books” seems to have been primarily a European endeavor; a related project by Romeyn B. Hough collecting North American woods in book form (using thin sections of wood attached to cardboard within a conventional book binding) was produced at the turn of the last century.

One of the most amazing things about plants is their ability to grow through all kinds of obstacles. When trees manage to do so, the spectacle is even more amazing because it is on such a grand scale. There are even more cool ones when you follow the link.

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Everyone wanted a Moon tree. In 1975 and ’76, trees were sent to the White House, to Independence Square in Philadelphia, to Valley Forge. “One tree went to the Emperor of Japan. Senators wanted trees to dedicate buildings. We even did some plantings in New Orleans because the mayor there, Mayor Moon, wanted some,” says Krugman. There were so many requests that “we had to produce additional seedlings from rooted cuttings of the original trees.”

No one kept systematic records, notes Dave Williams. That’s why the whereabouts of the trees today are mostly unknown.

There may be a moon tree somewhere near you! Link to story. Link to website. -via reddit

At the 50-acre Glacier Gardens in Alaska, designers added an unusual flair by uprooting more than twenty hemlock and spruce trees, flipping them over, and using the trunks as natural flower pots:

During the rehabilitation process, Steve was developing the lower landscaped gardens using a large piece of rented equipment to arrange the masses of soil, roots, plants, trees, and rock dragged down the mountain during the landslide. During the last few hours of equipment rental, the equipment was damaged while moving a large boulder. This boulder has become known as “Steve’s Rock” and is the centerpiece of one of the many waterfalls flowing through Glacier Gardens. Full of frustration about the large repair bill he was sure to see, he used the equipment to pick up a large tree stump and slammed the inverted stump into the ground trunk first. The tree stuck into the soft mud upside down and as the roots hung like the vines of a petunia basket, it only took moments before he had a vision of how to recycle the trees cleared from the development of the property: The Upside Down “Flower Towers.” Each flower tower is made by inverting spruce or hemlock trees with the root ball pointing towards the sky. The stock of the trunk buried 5-7 ft, netting on top, mosses laid down, and nearly 75 – 100 plants planted every year for guest enjoyment.

Official Website via Urlesque (where there are many marvelous pictures)

Image by flickr user John & Peggy Bromley used under creative commons license

Junkyard workers in Japan noticed this seedling sprouting up under a car over 25 years ago. They let it grow and now it’s lifted the whole car up in the air. Now they’ve created a shrine around it. Check out the video here.

Link via Boing Boing

Peter Cook and Becky Northey started making what they call Pooktre, the shaped plum trees into art and furniture. They started by making trees into a coffee table and a mirror frame. The chair above is one of the greatest. They harvest the trees in the fall and make new art from the stumps, which make new growth.

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Peter Beland of The Smithsonian Magazine has a fascinating look at Ascending The Giants, a unique "adventure group" led by arborists Brian French and Will Koomjian. The duo climbs the tallest trees to learn more about the wildlife that lives on the highest branches:

Up in the branches of this goliath, I felt the tree sway back and forth with the wind, an unsettling sensation. From the ground, the nine-foot-wide tree almost seemed sturdy enough to support the earth below it and not the other way around. But from my precarious vantage point in the canopy, I spied a forest floor littered with fallen giants.

“Oh, it’s at least 500 years old; it’s been through plenty of storms," said ATG co-founder Brian French, in an offhand attempt to both reassure and terrify me as we chatted 200 feet up in the tree. "Of course, I could be wrong.” We shot the breeze some more, and as the musk of ancient fir and moss wafted into my nostrils, I was reminded that this is a living organism.

Link | More at Ascending The Giants official website (including a really neat video clip!)

Previously on Neatorama: 10 Most Magnificent Trees in the World