Tiny bark beetles have been causing havoc in Germany's Harz mountains, eating away at trees and killing off swaths of the spruce population by hampering their ability to take in nutrients.
The high alpine forests of the Rio Grande National Forest are a sickbed. Swathes of gray trees are bald on one side, with patches of russet needles fading into scraggly branches.
Firefighters scouted the drought-stricken mountainsides around a New Mexico village as they looked for opportunities to slow a wind-driven wildfire that a day earlier had burned at least 150 homes and other structures while displacing thousands of residents and forcing the evacuation of two schools.
New research suggests that, sooner than expected, trees may become carbon sources rather than carbon sinks, as a feedback loop of rising temperatures drives them to release more greenhouse gases.
