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The Denver Post
The forests of southwest Colorado may be facing yet another new and highly destructive threat — the pine beetle. Over the past two decades, more than 120,000 acres of the Weminuche Wilderness — Colorado's largest designated wilderness area at 488,210 acres — have fallen prey to the destructive spruce beetle.
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FPS
This year's International Mass Timber Conference held March 28-30, in Portland, Oregon, featured many new products that are increasing the use of mass timber as a structural system. Some notable ones are featured in the latest issue of FPS' Wood Design Focus.
One article illustrates prefabrication and efficiency benefits of tall wood building construction. Additionally, it outlines how sensitivity to moisture can be alleviated if adequately protected during construction.
Another article discussed Dowel-Laminated Timber (DLT), a new mass timber product which can be used for floor, wall and roof structures. Panels are friction-fit together with hardwood dowels instead of nails and can be processed with machinery which allows for pre-integrated electrical conduit and other service runs.
To download the individual articles or to subscribe to Wood Design Focus, visit the FPS website. All past articles can be searched and downloaded from FPS' Knowledge Base. Downloads are free to FPS members.
Wood & Panel
American Softwoods, the promotional partnership formed by three major U.S. softwood trade associations has recently declared that the total exports of U.S. softwood lumber to India reached a value of $8.882 million in the first half of 2017. The announcement was made at the opening of MumbaiWood in Mumbai, India.
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Veolia
If a tree falls in a forest and nobody's there to hear it, does it make a sound? Moreover, what happens to it? This is becoming a legitimate issue for landscapes in British Columbia and the northwest region of the U.S., as an old friends' nesting habits evolve causing trees to fall prematurely. Nestled in the underbrush of the forest is an unlikely enemy to acres of pine trees across the heartland and west coast U.S. Smaller than a penny, mountain pine beetles are burrowing into pine wood in areas they normally don't venture into. In only 15 years, more than 44 million acres of pine have deteriorated due to the increase of pine beetle populations in increasingly temperate woods.
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Mongabay
Agroforestry integrates trees, shrubs, and crops in a system that functions well together — it covers over 1 billion hectares of land worldwide and its best known examples include shade grown coffee and chocolate. Indigenous peoples have practiced agroforestry for millennia but this technique is now gaining popularity with farmers everywhere.
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Missoulian
The summer of 2017 certainly set new records for Montana, both for acres burned, money spent in suppression tactics and smoke that over a two-month period often created air pollution double that of the most polluted city in the world — Beijing, China. So what, if any, solutions exist for the inhabitants of the Rocky Mountains?
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Bioenergy Insight
It will be easier for cities to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions coming from residential energy use rather than transportation, new research claims. This reduction will happen thanks to more efficient building practices and not greater housing density, according to a study published in the Journal of Planning Education and Research.
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Woodworking Network
According to a Swiss research team, tree bark may prove to be more than a waste product. Studies conducted by the National Research Program "Resource Wood" show that tannins (organic molecules) extracted from native conifer tree bark can be used to produce adhesives and composite materials. The Resource Wood research team has developed a process to extract the valuable tannins from tree bark. The team sees great potential.
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Treehugger
We clearly now have the technology to simply erase our forests, and architects and designers have a responsibility to think about the wood that we use and where it comes from. Grace Jeffers spent 10 years writing an encyclopedia of materials and learned a lot about wood — and how little most of us know about it. More importantly, even if we know something about the wood itself — its strength, its properties and its appearance — we know almost nothing about the forest.
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