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The prestigious EPA clean air award acknowledges the Placer County Air Pollution Control District, the US Forest Service and Sierra Pacific Industries who have teamed to implement projects designed to cost effectively manage portions of the 550,000 acres of forested lands that are at severe risk for wildfire in the Lake Tahoe region.

Volunteers have planted 185 trees in the historic Berkley Square neighborhood in Las Vegas as part of a U.S. Forest Service Recovery Act-funded Nevada forest revitalization project. The Berkley Square Tree Planting Project was one of the largest volunteer supported activities ever held in Berkley Square which is part of Las Vegas’ Ward 5.

Berkley Square represented an important step in civil rights for African-Americans in Las Vegas. The Historic Berkley Square Neighborhood is the first subdivision to be built in Nevada by and for African-American residents of Las Vegas. It was designed in 1949 by Paul R. Williams, an internationally-known African-American architect who also designed the La Concha Motel, as well as movie-star homes and public buildings in Los Angeles.

Baseball fans thrill at the thought of hearing a bat crack. But seeing an actual bat shatter is not one of those thrills. That’s because this seemingly harmless wood breaking can be dangerous for the players and fans and is the reason that the U.S. Forest Service Forest Products Lab has worked for several years to improve the strength of wooden bats.

The Products Lab’s efforts have not been in vain. Since Major League Baseball’s partnership with the Forest Service began in 2008 there has been an astonishing 50 percent reduction in multiple-piece failure rates in bats.

Cross posted from the Let's Move! blog:

Once again this year, U.S. Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell is encouraging kids and their families to reconnect with nature and have fun by participating in the 4^th annual National Get Outdoors Day (GO Day), on Saturday, June 11. This FREE event is designed to attract diverse communities to outdoor activities and motivate kids to get moving and explore their forests and other public lands.

This post is part of the Science Tuesday feature series on the USDA blog. Check back each week as we showcase stories and news from the USDA's rich science and research portfolio.

New research featured in the April/May 2011 issue of Science Findings, a monthly publication of the Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Station, can assist efforts aimed at conserving potentially imperiled populations of the North American red fox. “When most people think of the red fox, they envision the ones that thrive in low-elevation, human-dominated landscapes,” said lead author Keith Aubry. “But there are other extremely elusive and rarely seen populations that live only in isolated alpine and subalpine areas in the mountains of the Western United States.”

What better way to celebrate wildfire prevention education than saluting a 9-year-old girl and an organization that has roots dating back to 1891.

You might say that Dave Kretschmann has engineered his way into Major League Baseball’s history books. Kretschmann’s work as a research general engineer led him to figure out why so many bats used by Major League Baseball were shattered.

“Since late in the 2008 season, we’ve seen video of every shattered bat in Major League Baseball,” said Kretschmann, who is assigned to the Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wis., “We’ve tested hundreds of bats and recorded the who, when, and how of every shattered bat in 2009 and 2010. As a result of the implementation of our recommendations and the work of TECO, an independent certification and testing agency for wood products, there’s been a 50 percent reduction in the rate of multiple piece failures since the 2008 season.”

To celebrate its 13^th anniversary this year, the Lewis & Clark Interpretive Center in Great Falls, Montana, has gone to the dog – one dog in particular that served as an integral part of the Lewis & Clark expedition more than 200 years ago.

The Center historically interprets the importance and relevance of the expedition that opened up the western portion of the growing Unites States to other exploration and expansion. It is part of the Lewis & Clark National Forest.

In a scientific achievement that is important in planning for future climate scenarios, and for protecting some endangered animal species, U.S. Forest Service research geneticist Bryce Richardson and research ecologist Michael Schwartz, have sequenced more than 40 billion base pairs of DNA from 130 samples of plant,  animal and fungal species. The tree species were as diverse as tan oak, sugar pine and sagebrush.

This DNA sequencing is more than 12 times the amount of information in the human genome, which has about 3.3 billion base pairs. The massive undertaking, known as the Western Forest Transcriptome Survey, is a collaborative effort between four U.S. Forest Service research stations and four universities.

A study by researchers at the U.S. Forest Service, Forest Products Laboratory shows that the lowest rates of deforestation and forest carbon emissions occur in global regions with the highest rates of forest product output.

Counter intuitively global regions with the highest rates of deforestation and forest carbon emissions rank lowest in forest product output or what is referred to technically as industrial roundwood harvest.