TURNER, Ore. — Sixty feet above the ground, latched into a basket atop a lift, David Perfecto deftly plucked sticky green cones from the crown of a Douglas fir tree. Perfecto is a regional manager for ...

As specialized forestry staff at the USFS vanish and pinecone cowboys—the highly skilled contractors sent out in the field to collect cones—face a collapsing industry, entire ecosystems are ...

Tree climbing, an occupation with indigenous roots in California’s Sierra Nevada, is physically taxing even for athletes. Cone collectors are sometimes scaling trees that are hundreds of feet high, ...

Larch tree cones grow near the top of very tall trees, which makes them tough to collect for anything other than squirrels. The Flathead National Forest needs a lot of larch cones for its reseeding ...

Across the Western United States, wildfires fueled by climate change have destroyed more than 33 acres since 2020, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. With an uncertain future amid ...

It has many names: multi-story cropping, agroforestry, forest farming. All of these refer to farming within treed land. It’s a great way to seamlessly integrate the farm into the landscape and ...

On an October day in Plumas National Forest, Alex Lemnah traverses the canopy of an incense cedar nearly 100 feet off the ground, listening carefully for the sound of a branch snapping under his feet.