When the FAO crown cover threshold for land to count as "forest" dropped to 10%, its estimate of global forest area increased by hundreds of millions of hectares with over 100 million ha of land newly counting as forest just in Australia. The FAO had an explanation. bsky.app/profile/yond...
When I was younger I learned a definition of "forest" that prevailed in the '70s. The idea was that if we left a large wooded area alone for long enough it would reach a vegetative climax of closed canopy forest, so we took "closed canopy" as the foundational definition.
The question "what is a forest?" is a political one. A stark—if perhaps innocuous—example of this is the way that countries will select conflicting national definitions of "forest" to serve different political ends at the same time.
A fun thing you can do when you see a data analysis is to ask where the data came from and then look at it yourself. Let's take as an example the widely publicized 2018 paper of Thomas & Nigam about the expansion of the Sahara desert. doi.org/10.1175/JCLI...
I did unearth the source of the claim that the Sahara is expanding southward at 30 miles per year. Or rather, I unearthed the ruins of the source. The claim was invented in 1972 and its source vaguely referenced 4 times before becoming folklore.
So I've been hunting down the source of the claim that the Sahara is expanding southward at 30 miles per year. This flowchart summarizes my first attempt, which reached a dead end when the ultimate citation argued against the claim. Now I try again.
"The Sahara is expanding south at X kilometers per year." The value of X has varied over the last century, but all versions of the claim are false and conceptually malformed. One particularly implausible version caught my attention and I wanted to track down its origin.
It's not just you, strawberries have less flavor and aroma than they used to. One surprising reason was published this year. No one wants anthracnose and botrytis eating their strawberries, so growers apply a fungicide like Pristine 38WG or Abound 2.08F or Quadris Top 1.67SC.
