Environment: Puzzling Holes in the Forest

Trees from Maine to Alabama are showing a decline in growth

In some sections of Georgia and South Carolina, yellow pine trees seem to be growing much more slowly than they once did. In southern New Jersey, patches of pitch pines have stopped growing altogether. So have parcels of spruce trees on Whiteface Mountain in New York. On Camels Hump, a major peak in Vermont's Green Mountain range, and Mount Mitchell in North Carolina, the highest peak in the East, red spruce are losing their foliage and dying, leaving barren patches on the once...

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