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Experts now fear they've lost hope of eliminating sudden oak death, but that's not stopping Congress from putting money into the fight to contain the devastating disease. With tens of thousands of California oak trees already laid low, the House on Tuesday was set to approve some $7.5 million for research, eradication and control of the pathogen Phytopthera ramorum.

A stand of American chestnut trees that somehow escaped a blight that killed off nearly all their kind in the early 1900s has been discovered along a hiking trail not far from President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Little White House at Warm Springs.

After more than a decade of closely monitoring regeneration of oak trees on forest tracts around Pennsylvania, researchers in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences have begun to understand why stands of the state's most important tree are not replacing themselves after they are harvested.

Tropical forests that house El Salvador's famed coffee plantations and provide habitat for migrating birds are being depleted at an alarming rate, scientists warned Tuesday. Between 2001 and 2004, the country lost 21,025 hectares of forest-covered coffee farms, Mario Acosta, president of El Salvador's Foundation for Coffee Research (Procafe), said.

The people who started what's now the largest biodiesel refinery in the state are planning what could be the largest such plant in the nation, in the heart of Western Washington's depressed timber country.

The House on Wednesday approved a bill to speed up the logging of burned forests and planting of new trees after storms and wildfires. The bill, approved 243-182, would order that federal land hit by disasters over more than 1,000 acres be restored within months, rather than years -- before insects and rot sets in, diminishing the commercial value of fire-killed timber.

The U.S. Forest Service and three universities will begin annual sudden oak death aerial surveys from May 22 to June 7, looking to see if the disease is spreading around the North Coast.

Ancient, old-growth trees inside the sprawling wilderness of Algonquin Park are in danger of being wiped out by loggers because the area hasn't been properly mapped by the Ontario government, a new study to be released today suggests.