The NCASI Northern Regional Meeting will be held at the Jefferson Street Inn in Wausau, Wisconsin on May 18-19, 2011. A technical session on Sustainable Production and Use of Forest Biomass will follow the general session the morning of May 18. On the morning of May 19, NCASI will offer a workshop that will review and provide a forum to discuss water quality issues and regulations affecting sustainable management of northern forests.
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The US Environmental Protection Agency has published a proposed rule to defer regulation of CO2 emissions from biomass under certain provisions of the Clean Air Act (Federal Register Vol. 76, No. 54, pp. 15249-15266; March 21, 2011). During the three-year deferral period, “EPA will be conducting a detailed examination of the science associated with biogenic CO2 emissions from stationary sources.”
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An EPA website posting announced that “On March 3, 2011, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) requested an extension to allow more time for pesticide operators to obtain permits for pesticide discharges into U.S. waters.”
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The Sustainable Forestry Initiative® (SFI), Weyerhaeuser Company, and NCASI recently supported an assessment by NatureServe of the extent to which globally imperiled and critically imperiled species and communities are associated with generalized habitat types. The NatureServe assessment encompassed three pilot regions. For each of the three pilot regions, NatureServe established lists of globally imperiled species and communities of conservation concern to the forest products industry, documented occurrences by county, and characterized the generalized habitat types as optimal, suitable, marginal, or unsuitable for each imperiled species/community.
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The National Soil Carbon Network (NSCN) was developed to improve the understanding of soil carbon dynamics across the United States by assembling databases, identifying and filling gaps in data coverage, and through modeling and experimentation. Specific goals of the NSCN are to 1) coordinate soil carbon observation, archiving, experimentation, and modeling; 2) understand the relationship between soil carbon and ecosystem services; 3) forecast soil carbon vulnerability under changing climate, land use, and other disturbance; and 4) contribute to organizing and communicating this information for land managers, modelers, and policy makers.
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