Thunen

"Quarries provide valuable habitats for wild bees and other animals and plants that occur on the now rare calcareous grasslands," explains lead author Dr Felix Kirsch from the Institute of Biodiversity at the Thünen Institute.

Across Central Europe, some 300 million cubic meters of wood was damaged, according to forest scientist Andreas Bolte of the Thünen Institute, the German government’s forest research agency.

A lack of community input is a leading cause of failure, according to a survey of agroforestry projects in 66 nations published last year in Forests by a team led by forest scientist Markus Höhl of the Thünen Institute of Forest Ecosystems.

“This is just an overview but it’s absolutely enough to cause alarm, because we found so much tropical timber,” said Volker Haag, a wood anatomist at the Thünen Institute of Wood Research in Hamburg, Germany, who led the work.

The micrograph shows a section of charcoal made from a tropical Fabaceae tree from Africa; it was captured using a technique developed by Gerald Koch and Volker Haag at the Thünen Centre of Competence on the Origin of Timber in Hamburg, Germany.