Jamax Forest Solutions

19/11/2025

Our forests evolved with cool Aboriginal burning, they’re not used to benign management and the Bellbirds know it!!

19/11/2025

Waste to energy, what is it? Is it safe? This might answer some of those questions.

I read a recent article about our proposed Woodlawn facility with concern — not because people are asking questions, but…

19/11/2025

“We were passionate about using local recycled timbers and natural fibres while bringing the outdoors inside.”

“I always say, if you want to sell beer, put timber in your pub’ Kennedy enthused.

“And that’s never been truer than it is today. There’s what they call a ‘biophilia’ aspect of timber – an actual scientific and chemical reaction that occurs when you put natural products into a built environment.

“When you step into a hotel that has timber and natural elements in it, you feel a lot more relaxed. It makes you want to stay longer, as you feel more comfortable,” he said. “When selecting the timber for the build, Northern Grounds wanted to use recycled materials that were attractive, long-lasting, and had a low carbon footprint.”

More than just a pub, Northern Grounds is a true celebration of the Australian outdoors — a place where the fire is always burning and the door is always open

18/11/2025

It’s Cheaper, Faster, Greener — Brazil Can Assemble Timber Homes in 10 Days!

Half the price of masonry and far quicker, Brazilian developers are using the country’s abundant supply of plantation timber to build factory housing.

As the world gathers in Belém for COP30, Brazilian developers are turning to local eucalyptus, including reforested timbers, to build low-rise and mid-rise hou

18/11/2025

You would think if the "greens" understood the carbon cycle, they'd be clamouring for biomass to replace coal and gas to run our power stations.

Afterall, biomass comes from recyclable carbon - carbon in the atmosphere is absorbed by plants through photosynthesis and converted into cellulose (the main structural component of biomass), biomass is burnt (ideally after the useable biomass is turned into permanent carbon-fixing timber products, etc) and the leftover carbon is re-released into the atmosphere.

You'd have to think that's better than releasing "new" carbon atoms from coal and gas, where it has previously been removed from the atmosphere and "fixed" millions of years ago.

Penny Sharpe, NSW Minister for Climate Change, Energy, Heritage and the Environment, has a seat at the table when budgets that can help resolve the waste issues are decided. Heres some background she needs to make the right decisions.

18/11/2025

“By analysing water samples for traces of DNA, we can detect hundreds of species and gain a comprehensive picture of life beneath the surface,” Brunt said.

Pretty cool!!

The Lockyer Valley Regional Council will receive a funding boost for the protection of platypus and biodiversity.

12/11/2025

Thinning, Burning Forests Provide Multiple Benefits, Some of Them Surprising

Wildfires are growing more frequent and severe across the western United States, and California's Sierra Nevada is ground zero. Decades of fire suppression have left these forests overstocked and vulnerable to catastrophic fires, drought and pest outbreaks.

Beyond destroying homes and infrastructure, high-severity wildfires release massive amounts of carbon, degrade water quality, erode soils, reduce timber supply and fill the air with hazardous smoke that threatens public health.

A team of researchers from UC Merced and collaborating institutions has published a study showing that fuels treatment such as mechanical thinning and prescribed burning can dramatically reduce wildfire risks and produce measurable economic benefits across four major ecosystem services: carbon storage, timber provisioning, erosion regulation and air-quality protection. The paper was published in Science of the Total Environment, an international multidisciplinary science journal.

California has recognized the urgent need for massive expansion of fuels treatment and has incorporated these goals into statewide forest resilience plans. But progress has been slowed by the lack of a credible, comprehensive analysis of their full economic value, which has made it difficult to build the momentum and financing needed to accelerate and scale up treatments.

"Wildfires in the Sierra Nevada don't just burn trees; they erode soils, release carbon and threaten community health," said Han Guo, a UC Merced postdoctoral scholar and the study's lead author. "Our analysis shows that treating forests reduces these risks and delivers tangible economic benefits to society."

By combining wildfire history, ecological modeling and market-based valuation, the team demonstrated that treatment substantially reduces damages. These avoided losses translate into economic benefits worth thousands of dollars per acre, totalling billions of dollars. The magnitude of these benefits varies by location depending on ecosystem conditions, wildfire probability and treatment intensity.

Philip Saksa is a UC Merced alumnus and co-founder and chief scientist at Blue Forest, a nonprofit conservation finance organization. Saska wasn't involved in the research, but he agrees with the importance of its findings.

"When we can show not just the environmental impacts but also the dollar value of avoided wildfire damage, it strengthens the case for innovative financing models, including public and private cost-sharing," Saska said. "Given the cost of fuels treatment needed, this is what is needed to scale up treatments to match the scale of the wildfire challenge."

The research provides a scalable framework for guiding state and federal forest management strategies and for developing new funding mechanisms to accelerate the pace of treatments.

"This research really embodies how the Sierra Nevada Research Institute produces actionable science that supports resilient forests and communities," said Professor Asmeret Asefaw Berhe, director of SNRI. "Comprehensive analyses like this integrate wildfire modeling, ecosystem services and economic valuation, all of which are essential for guiding effective management decisions and scaling up treatments."

"SNRI provides a platform for interdisciplinary collaboration, and the results demonstrate that fuels management is an investment in California's future resilience."

Source: Patty Guerra, https://www.ucmerced.edu/news/2025/thinning-burning-forests-provide-multiple-benefits-some-them-surprising

07/11/2025

Koalas are popping up everywhere (or it's amazing what you find if you actually LOOK)

From high in the sky, a thermal camera attached to a drone narrowed in on a lump in a Snowy…

07/11/2025

This month's story is about the Kosciuszko National Park.

It traces the fascinating and often tragic history of land use in the Snowy Mountains from the early mountain stockmen and the rise of snow leases to the bitter political and scientific battles that led to the 1958 grazing ban.

For decades, academics and bureaucrats blamed graziers for erosion in the alpine country. Yet no properly designed scientific studies were ever carried out to prove that grazing was the cause. Meanwhile, the real culprits – rabbits, wildfires, and the vast earthworks of the Snowy Hydro Scheme – were largely ignored.

When the National Parks and Wildlife Service took over in 1967, they inherited a landscape stripped of its most experienced managers. Grazing and controlled burning were banned, and the policy of “letting nature heal” took hold. The result was dense scrub, massive fuel loads, catastrophic fires, and erosion far worse than anything caused by the old stockmen and their stock.

My story illustrates how politics, ideology, and flawed science have combined to create a park that now burns hotter, more frequently, and with greater environmental loss than ever before.

It’s a timely reminder that slogans aren’t science and that good management depends on practical experience as much as theory.

You can read the full story at this link: https://www.robertonfray.com/2025/11/07/kosciuszkos-managed-decline-how-politics-and-bad-science-burned-the-high-country/

05/11/2025

The farmer from Central West NSW says feral pigs are eating 99 out of every 100 lambs on the property.

Neville Mattick says feral pigs are eating the lambs on his farm in the NSW Central West, with fewer than one in 100 surviving this season.

04/11/2025

Conventional wisdom suggests that wildfires in the western United States (WUS) degrade air quality nationwide as a result of aerosol emissions and eastward transport. However, we found that heat produced by wildfires, a commonly neglected effect, can ...

03/11/2025

Despite being the 7th most forested country in the world, following the cessation of public native forest harvesting in Victoria and WA in 2024, Australia was forced to import 46% of its solid timber needs from overseas.

Five countries have half the world’s forests

Russia tops the list with 833 million hectares (ha) of forest, one-fifth of global tree cover. Source: Visual Capitalist

This shows 1 to 10 of 236 entries the full list is at https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-countries-with-the-largest-forests-in-2025/

Together with Brazil (486M ha) and Canada (369M ha), the top three nations account for more than 40% of global forests.

Add the US (309M ha) and China (227M ha), and the share rises to 50%.

This concentration underlines how policy decisions in a handful of capitals can sway the fate of the world’s woodland.

Brazil’s Amazon rainforest alone stores roughly one-quarter of all land-based carbon, making its preservation a climate priority.

Other equatorial nations, including the DRC, Indonesia, and Peru, also appear in the top 10. Their moist, biodiverse forests act as vital “lungs,” recycling water and stabilizing rainfall patterns far beyond their borders.

Yet these countries are simultaneously hotspots for logging, agriculture, and mining, highlighting the tension between economic growth and conservation.

China’s fifth-place ranking is backed by decades of large-scale tree-planting initiatives, such as the “Great Green Wall.”

Across Europe, Sweden and Finland show how sustainable forestry can coexist with vigorous timber industries, each maintaining roughly 28 million hectares of managed woodland.

Türkiye and Spain, further down the list, also owe their sizable forest footprints to ambitious reforestation programs that reversed 20th-century declines.

These examples spotlight policy tools like afforestation incentives and strict harvest limits that other nations could adopt.

Despite these initiatives, preserving primary forests (that is, not planted by humans) remains a critical environmental goal in combating climate change.

Discover the countries with the largest forests in 2025 and how just five nations hold more than half of global woodland.