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SD public defense duties shift from counties to state; SCOTUS appears skeptical of restricting government communications with social media companies; Trump lawyers say he can't make bond; new scholarships aim to connect class of 2024 to high-demand jobs.

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The SCOTUS weighs government influence on social media, and who groups like the NRA can do business with. Biden signs an executive order to advance women's health research and the White House tells Israel it's responsible for the Gaza humanitarian crisis.

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Midwest regenerative farmers are rethinking chicken production, Medicare Advantage is squeezing the finances of rural hospitals and California's extreme swing from floods to drought has some thinking it's time to turn rural farm parcels into floodplains.

USGS Scientists Uproot Long-held Beliefs about Trees

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author Mary Kuhlman, Managing Editor

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Monday, February 3, 2014   

INDIANAPOLIS - A long-held belief about old trees has been uprooted. A recent study by the U.S. Geological Survey finds that trees' growth rates do not slow as they get older and larger. Instead, they keep putting on mass along with their years.

According to the study's lead author, Nate Stephenson, a forest ecologist with the USGS, if people did the same, we'd weigh well over a ton by retirement. For trees, the finding changes what we know about how they store carbon, and has implications for forest management.

"About for every pound of mass a tree puts on, it's absorbing and sequestering about a half-pound of carbon," he said, and added that old, large trees are better at storing and absorbing carbon from the atmosphere.

Stephenson pointed out that the rapid absorption rates mean old trees are the star players within forest carbon dynamics. And that's also of interest in terms of the changing climate.

"Change is going to happen no matter what, and if we want to project how forests are going to respond to that, we really have to get some of these key pieces right."

Trees around the world were studied for the report, more than 600,000 of them from 400 species, on six continents.

The study has been published in the journal Nature at Nature.com.





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