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Natural Phenomenon: Entertainment & Culture: vanityfair.com – Annotated
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Via Archinect.com.
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This fall, after eight years and almost half a billion dollars, world-famous architect Renzo Piano will complete the greenest museum ever built—the new California Academy of Sciences, in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park—housing its aquarium, planetarium, and natural-history museum under a two-and-a-half-acre “living roof.”
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by Matt Tyrnauer May 2008
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The Kimball Natural History Museum’s “living roof” with Jules Verne porthole skylights. Photographs by Todd Eberle.
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“Talk about Moses coming down from the mountain,” says Greg Farrington, the academy’s director. “He just nailed it. It was inspiration. His vision was to lift up a piece of the park and slide the museum underneath.”
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The rain forest inside the new academy building is enclosed in a glass dome.
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Few, if any, buildings of this stature come close to making their sustainability programs comprehensible as well as visually inspiring components of their design.
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“The building,” says Piano, “had to be green and sustainable to go with its purpose—study of the earth and science. It is also in a very unusual place, the middle of one of the most beautiful parks in the world. You almost never get a chance to build something in the middle of a great park, so it needed to be transparent. You needed to see where you are.
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National Parks: Billions needed for Millions of Acres
Private land in national parks at risk for development – Los Angeles Times Annotated
April 9, 2008
Central Park Tree Inventory: 24,132
A Newfangled Way to Count the Trees in the Park – New York Times Annotated
Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times
Mr. George used a clinometer to measure the height of a tree. He also used a G.P.S. device to locate trees.
Mr. George was collecting information for a comprehensive inventory of Central Park’s trees, the first of its kind to use global positioning technology to pinpoint the exact location of each one.
The Central Park Conservancy, a nonprofit group that manages the park under contract with the city, hired the Davey Resource Group, based in Ohio, to conduct the survey with a team of certified arborists, including Mr. George. The final count: 24,132 mature trees (informally defined as higher than chest level with a trunk diameter of more than six inches). The arborists noted an additional 2,000 saplings, one to six inches in diameter.
The survey was completed in March, producing, for each of the park’s trees, a computer file storing its long-term history. With this record, park workers can assess the maintenance needs of each tree, track continuing threats like Dutch elm disease and find new planting opportunities.
The most breathtaking tree in the park, in Mr. Calvanese’s opinion, is an American elm in the East Meadow, which has grown to 59 inches in trunk diameter from 44 inches in 1982.
He called the stand of elms along Literary Walk, at the southern end of the park’s central promenade, the greatest in the country, and noted a wealth of “specimen trees,” which assume perfect form and stand out from the surrounding landscape.
The survey concluded that the park’s efforts to reduce invasive trees, which produce lots of seed and take over shrub borders, had been successful: the number of Norway maples was 860, down from 1,302 in 1982. The Norway maples and Sycamore maples, European imports, are being replaced with native species like the red oak, black oak and sugar maple.
Controlled Floods?: An Oxymoron in Grand Canyon
Three-Day Grand Canyon Flood Aims to Restore Ecosystem Annotated
Amanda Lee Myers in Page, Arizona
Associated Press
March 6, 2008
More than 300,000 gallons (more than a million liters) of water per second were released from Lake Powell above the dam near the Arizona–Utah border.
That’s enough water to fill the Empire State Building in 20 minutes, said Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne.
“This gives you a glimpse of what nature has been doing for millions of years, cutting through and creating this magnificent canyon,” Kempthorne said after he pulled the lever Wednesday, releasing the water from Glen Canyon Dam, upstream from Grand Canyon National Park.
The water level in the Grand Canyon rose 15 feet (4.6 meters) in some places.
Officials hope water from the three-day, controlled flood will leave behind sediment and restore sandbars as it goes back to normal levels.
Officials have flooded the canyon twice before, in 1996 and 2004.
Before the dam was built in 1963, the river was warm and muddy, and natural flooding built up sandbars that are essential to native plant and fish species. The river is now cool and clear, its sediment blocked by the dam.
The change helped speed the extinction of four fish species and push two others, including the endangered humpback chub, near the edge.
Shrinking beaches have led to the loss of half the camping sites in the canyon in the past decade.
Which Witch Hazel? Raving about Jelena.
Winter’s Cheerleader, Yelling for Spring – New York Times Annotated
In the Garden
I first encountered Hamamelis mollis, the Chinese species, years ago, at Clark Botanic Garden, in Albertson, N.Y. It was a sunny January day, and this sprawling beauty — 5 feet tall and 20 feet across — lounged like a big blonde sunning in the 12-acre garden.
Unfurling with the sun, the little clusters of clear yellow crimped flowers were sending their sweet scent my way in an impossible promise of spring.
How could these plants be blooming in the middle of winter? And why would they want to?
“It has to do with chilling requirements,” said Peter Del Tredici, a lecturer at Harvard and former director of living collections at the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University in Boston. The very first witch hazel to bloom, for example, is Hamamelis vernalis, native to the Ozarks, and hardy to 30 below zero. It bloomed in Boston in mid-January.
“Vernalis only requires a month’s worth of chilling,” Mr. Del Tredici said. “That’s long enough for this species. The days are getting longer. And it takes advantage of insects that hatch with the first warm weather.”
The witch hazels that enchant this time of year are H. mollis, the Chinese species; its many cultivars; and hybrids of the Chinese and the Japanese species (H. japonica), which range in color from pale yellow to gold, orange and red.