"New satellite imaging has revealed that hurricanes Katrina and Rita produced the largest single forestry disaster on record in the nation -- an essentially unreported ecological catastrophe that killed or severely damaged about 320 million trees in Mississippi and Louisiana," writes Marc Kaufman of The Washington Post, reporting on a study published today in the journal Science, primarily by researchers at Tulane University in New Orleans.
"The die-off, caused initially by wind and later by weeks-long pooling of stagnant water, was so massive that researchers say it will add significantly to the global greenhouse gas buildup -- ultimately putting as much carbon from dying vegetation into the air as the rest of the nation's forest takes out in a year of photosynthesis," Kaufman writes.
"The downing of so many trees has opened vast and sometimes fragile tracts to several aggressive and fast-growing exotic species that are already squeezing out far more environmentally productive native species. Efforts to limit the damage have been handicapped by the ineffectiveness of a $504 million federal program to help Gulf Coast landowners replant and fight the invasive species."
James Cummins, executive director of Wildlife Mississippi and a board member of the Mississippi Forestry Commission, told Kaufman, "This is the worst environmental disaster in the United States since the Exxon Valdez accident . . . and the greatest forest destruction in modern times." (Read more) For a Los Angeles Times story on the study, by Thomas H. Maugh II and Karen Kaplan, click here.
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