A polar vortex brought rare winter weather conditions to the Northeast of the US on May 9, with freezing temperatures and snow reported across parts of New England, including Vermont. Up to 9 inches of snow was recorded in parts of Vermont with freeze or frost advisories reported in 20 states across the Midwest and Northeast. Video filmed by Mitch @VermonsterWx shows several inches of “light and fluffy” snow accumulation near Readsboro, Vermont. Credit: Mitch @VermonsterWx via Storyful

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Up to 3,000 people gathered in Munich, Germany, on May 9 to demonstrate against the restrictions put in place throughout the country to stem the spread of the coronavirus, according to local outlet TAG24. TAG24 reported that the protest had only been registered for 80 people. A larger crowd of people assembled, as this video shot in the central Marienplatz area of Munich shows. Similar protests took place across Germany on the same day in cities such as Berlin, Stuttgart, and Nuremburg. No violence was reported. On May 6, German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced steps to ease the country’s coronavirus lockdown and introduced a new “emergency mechanism” that can be triggered by regional authorities to contain local Covid-19 outbreaks. As of May 9, Germany had over 171,000 confirmed cases of the coronavirus, and 7,525 deaths, according to figures published in Tagesspiegel. Credit: @Franzisker2 via Storyful

Visibility in parts of southern Ontario, Canada, was severely affected as a snow squall blanketed areas of the province — including the town of Barrie — on May 9, reports said . A frost advisory notice was issued for the area by the Canadian government, warning that “near or below freezing temperatures” were expected through Wednesday, May 13. Reports said that the unseasonable snowfall can be attributed to a polar vortex sweeping over the region. Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield posted a video of snow falling outside his Ontario home, saying, “It’s May 9. Cut it out.” This video, filmed by local resident Tom Eves, shows a snow squall in Barrie, north of Toronto. “Well what can you do but laugh,” wrote Eves on Twitter. Credit: Tom Eves via Storyful

A driver who smashed into a female cyclist, injuring her badly, then drove off should hand himself in, police say.

Thousands of people have flocked to shopping malls and supermarkets across Adelaide, raising concerns of growing complacency over the coronavirus pandemic.

The British government has told airlines it will introduce a 14-day quarantine period for most people arriving from abroad to try to avoid a second peak of the coronavirus pandemic, an association representing the airlines said on Saturday.

THE COVID-19 Omnibus (Emergency Measures) Bill 2020 passed.  The legislation “implements a range of temporary emergency measures to support Victorians and continue delivering the services we all rely on”.

One of my passions as a councillor and a key commitment to my community was to simplify local government processes and clarify what as unnecessarily complex. Break the obfuscation nexus, you may say.

Did you do it? Did you download? Did you trust the federal government enough to let them trace your extended interactions with your phone?

‘Kudos’ is an interesting word.

This week I went to my first farewell for a co-worker on Zoom.

Since these middle schoolers have been sent home during the coronavirus shutdowns, they decided to lift each other's spirits by having some virtual fun.

The post Middle Schoolers Bust a Move From Home By Joining Together for Music Video Against COVID-19 Fears appeared first on Good News Network.

Despite these Indiana neighbors being forced to stay isolated during the COVID-19 crisis, they have come up with a clever way of staying connected.

The post This Neighborhood Has Been Staying Connected During Social Distancing With Creative ‘I Spy’ Game appeared first on Good News Network.

These two siblings from New Jersey have managed to raise more than $2,200 in order to benefit their local businesses and healthcare workers.

The post New Jersey Teens Take Matters into Their Own Hands to Help First Responders and Small Businesses Amidst COVID-19 Crisis appeared first on Good News Network.

Sydney, 10, and her mom animated a kid video to suggests how schools can donate surplus protection equipment (PPE) during COVID-19 pandemic.

The post 10-Year-Old Seeks to Empower Other Kids During COVID-19 Pandemic appeared first on Good News Network.

Tanner Howe, a singer-songwriter from Huntington Beach, hoped that his performances would brighten up isolating neighborhoods—and he was 100% correct.

The post Musician Uses Truck Bed to Play Drive-By Concerts for Friends in Quarantine – and the Video is Incredibly Heartwarming appeared first on Good News Network.

This hardy senior has been sewing hundreds of homemade face masks for all her friends, family, and community members—all while jamming to The Beatles.

The post 89-Year-Old Sews 600 Masks While Listening to The Beatles – WATCH appeared first on Good News Network.

United States unemployment has risen to its highest level since the Great Depression, with tens of millions of jobs wiped out in just one month.

Bike stunts, pet birthdays and a baby names which stumped the world are some of the trending topics on social media in Australia.

The New Zealand Cabinet will meet on Monday to decide whether restrictions can be eased allowing domestic travel to restart and most businesses to open. There have been four new recorded infections in the past five days, and 90 percent of approximately 1500 confirmed or probable cases, have recovered from the virus. As the New Zealand and Australian economies reopen, a Trans-Tasman travel bubble could emerge as a serious possibility, if both nations continue to effectively flatten their coronavirus curves. Image: Associated Press

Australians are being warned to take care when visiting their mums today, particularly if they are elderly.

Tiger King Joe Exotic’s new clothing line sold out within hours, netting more than US $20,000 ($A30,600). in sales, it was reported.

When watching Formula One, it can be easy to forget these drivers are taking their lives in their own hands.

Royal Queensland’s return as Australian PGA host has been locked in for December 3-6 as part of a new wraparound summer season to shake up golf.

Cricket: Usman Khawaja joined the Fox Sports News desk and gave his opinion about the recent developments at Cricket Australia and what he would like to improve.

Horse Racing: In a day full of more great racing, Russian Camelot claimed the honours in the South Australian derby, with a few other shock results along the way.

Rupert Guinness is cycling across America — from his living room in Edgecliff.

Coaches are against plans for the NRL to revert back to one referee, with Raiders mentor Ricky Stuart already fearing the game has become “a 100m by 70m UFC ring”.

This will go down as the worst negotiation blunder in Australian sporting history.

Supermarket giant Aldi has issued a warning to shoppers after a labelling mistake led to the recall of a deli meat product.

It seems that banks and other lenders are doing their best to lock in our mortgages.

Commercial thinning in fully-stocked normal Douglas-fir stands of merchantable size is evaluated and compared to the alternatives of leaving stands to grow unthinned or of liquidating them. Comparisons are made in terms of volume production and financial returns.

Cofiring wood and coal at Fairbanks, Alaska, area electrical generation facilities represents an opportunity to use woody biomass from clearings within the borough's wildland-urban interface and from other sources, such as sawmill residues and woody material intended for landfills. Potential benefits of cofiring include air quality improvements, reduced greenhouse gas emissions, market and employment development opportunities, and reduction of municipal wood residues at area landfills. Important issues that must be addressed to enable cofiring include wood chip uniformity and quality, fuel mixing procedures, transportation and wood chip processing costs, infrastructure requirements, and long-term biomass supply. Additional steps in implementing successful cofiring programs could include test burns, an assessment of area biomass supply and treatment needs, and a detailed economic and technical feasibility study. Although Fairbanks North Star Borough is well positioned to use biomass for cofiring at coal burning facilities, long-term cofiring operations would require expansion of biomass sources beyond defensible-space-related clearings alone. Long-term sources could potentially include a range of woody materials including forest harvesting residues, sawmill residues, and municipal wastes.

Roads are important ecological features of forest landscapes, but their cause-andeffect relationships with other ecosystem components are only recently becoming included in integrated landscape analyses. Simulation models can help us to understand how forested landscapes respond over time to disturbance and socioeconomic factors, and potentially to address the important role roads play in these processes.

Production of high-quality water is a vitally important ecosystem service in the largely semiarid interior Columbia River basin (ICRB).

Agencies and organizations deploy various strategies in response to environmental challenges, including the formulation of policy, programs, and regulations. Citizen-based environmental stewardship is increasingly seen as an innovative and important approach to improving and conserving landscape health. A new research focus on the stewardship of urban natural resources is being launched by the U.S. Forest Service in the Pacific Northwest region. Early scoping efforts are addressing various scales of human systems ranging from individuals to organizations to the entire positive "footprint" of stewardship on the land. This report addresses a fundamental need—to understand and describe civic environmental stewardship in urban settings. Stewardship has been described and defined in diverse ways within a variety of contexts, including the philosophical literature of environmentalism, agency program descriptions, and outreach by sponsoring organizations. Constructing a framework to convey the layered meanings of stewardship will help to focus and guide future research. A cognitive mapping technique was used to elicit responses to the question "What is environmental stewardship?" Semistructured interviews were conducted with representatives of nine Seattle environmental organizations, a group of practitioners who collectively represent over 100 years of experience in the field. Program planners and managers have particularly direct experiences of stewardship. Cognitive mapping enables participants to explore, then display, their particular knowledge and perceptions about an idea or activity. Analysis generated thematic, structural representations of shared concepts. Results show that the practitioners have multilayered perceptions of stewardship, from environmental improvement to community building, and from actions to outcomes. The resulting conceptual framework demonstrates the full extent of stewardship activity and meaning, which can aid stewardship sponsors to improve stewardship programs, leading to better experiences for participants and higher quality outcomes for projects and environments.

We conducted an experimental study of infection, transmission, and persistence of a nucleopolyhedrovirus (NPV) of Douglas-fir tussock moth (Orgyia pseudotsugata) to better understand mechanisms determining the efficacy of the virus when it is used as a microbial control agent. In a field experiment, we quantified infection rates of larvae exposed to either Tussock Moth Biocontrol-1, the strain currently used for control by the U.S. Forest Service, or a wild-type strain isolated from a natural population. We first allowed each pathogen to decay on experimental branches for 0, 1, or 3 days before allowing uninfected larvae to feed on the branches, and then we fit both a generalized linear model and an epidemiological model of virus transmission to the infection data. Longer decay of the NPV resulted in lower infection rates, but evidence that overall virus transmission differed between wild and pesticide isolates of NPV was weak. The short persistence time of the virus suggests that it does not last long on foliage, in turn suggesting that application of TM Biocontrol-1 must be carefully timed to ensure maximum mortality.

Fungi are key players in the health, diversity, and productivity of forest ecosystems in Pacific Northwest forests, as mycorrhizal associations, pathogens, decomposers, nontimber resources, and food resources for wildlife. A number of invertebrate species are associated with wood decay fungi, serve as vectors for fungal pathogens, or are fungivorous (consume fungi) and influence rates of wood decay and nutrient mineralization. In Washington and Oregon, 31 wildlife species among 8 families are fungivores, and at least 14 wildlife species disperse fungi. Down wood can provide nurse substrates for seedlings and beneficial mycorrhizal fungi, refuges from pathogenic soil fungi, sources of nutrients for decay fungi, and substrates supporting overall fungal diversity. Presence, density, distribution, and diversity of fungi are influenced by forest stand management practices, forest age class, and effects of fire. Old forests provide for a suite of rare fungi species. Old legacy trees retained during forest harvest can provide some degree of conservation of beneficial and rare fungi. Fungi can be difficult to detect and monitor; surveying for fungi at various times of the year, for multiple (at least 5) years, and by including hypogeous (belowground) samples, can improve detection rates. Studies are needed in the Pacific Northwest to quantify the amount of down wood—number of pieces, sizes, total biomass, percentage of forest floor cover, and other attributes—necessary for maintaining or restoring fungal biodiversity and viable levels of individual fungi species, especially rare species.

The Silvies Valley Ranch is an example of using local innovation to combat the global problem of incised streams on rangelands. Incised channels reduce the flow between water in the channel and water in the surrounding soils, which reduces the vegetation available for wildlife habitat and cattle forage. One of the ranch owners, Scott Campbell, a doctor of veterinary medicine, believes that stream incision is related to the decline of beaver populations; thus, the ranch’s approach to restoration includes efforts to mimic beavers’ influence on the system. He is using an extensive network of low-rise dams made from locally available materials (dirt, gravel, rock, and logs), commonly referred to as “artificial beaver dams” (ABDs). Campbell said that the ABDs on the ranch successfully increased stream connectivity to their floodplains and increased the quantity and forage quality of wet meadows on the property, with no changes in where cattle were grazing. The experiences of this landowner exemplify a unique approach that provides a model for others facing similar challenges to doing restoration on private land. The transformation taking place on the Silvies Valley Ranch has garnered the attention of neighboring ranch owners, some of whom are beginning to experiment with similar restoration technologies. Campbell would like to continue installing structures, but has encountered numerous roadblocks in the permitting process. He has since taken an active role in building legislative support for the ABD technology being used on the ranch, and in facilitating its adoption in other places. This case study—based on interviews with stakeholders involved in the Silvies Valley Ranch project—highlights the social benefits and challenges experienced by one rancher using ABDs as a restoration tool, and provides insights for improving their use in the future. It is part of a larger interdisciplinary study that explores the potential of different beaver-related restoration approaches for achieving watershed restoration and livestock production goals on rangelands in the Western United States.

Here are some of the negatives I've faced while trying to make use of my daily permitted exercise

This easy and tasty recipe can be made in the microwave

These cosy and comforting banana bread recipes are healthy, easy to make and delicious

While it is not illegal to have a bonfire, some Surrey councils are urging residents not to light them

Forget adding oil and eggs, you only need a can of fizzy to make the famous cake box

The popular burger chain has reopened its Guildford branch but is it worth ordering for delivery?

Have you had any that are worse?

There are two new sites, one in Cranleigh and the other in Farnham

National forests and grasslands are home to a diverse array of wildlife.

The Chugach and Tongass National Forests are changing, possibly in response to global warming.