Latest news with #Birchenko
The Star
13-06-2025
- Science
- The Star
Saving seeds amid the smoke
SCIENTIST Inna Birchenko began to cry as she described the smouldering protected forest in Thailand where she was collecting samples from local trees shrouded in wildfire smoke. 'This beautiful, diverse community of trees and animals is being destroyed as you see it, as you watch it,' she said. Birchenko, a geneticist at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, was collecting seeds and leaves in Umphang Wildlife Sanctuary with colleagues from Britain and Thailand. They will study how temperature and moisture affect germination and whether genetics dictate those responses. That may one day help ensure reforestation is done with trees that can withstand the hotter temperatures and drier conditions caused by climate change. But in Umphang, a remote region in Thailand's northwest, the scientists confronted the toll that human activity and climate change are already having on forests that are supposed to be pristine and protected. Birchenko and her colleagues hiked kilometre after kilometre through burned or still-smouldering forest, each footstep stirring up columns of black and grey ash. They passed thick fallen trees that were smoking or even being licked by dancing flames, and traversed stretches of farmland littered with corn husks, all within the sanctuary's boundaries. The wildlife for which the sanctuary is famous – hornbills, deer, elephants and even tigers – was nowhere to be seen. Birchenko (left) collecting Albizia odoratissima leaves in the wildlife sanctuary. — AFP Instead, there were traces of the fire's effect: a palm-sized cicada, its front neon yellow, its back end charred black; and the nest of a wild fowl, harbouring five scorched eggs. 'My heart is broken,' said Nattanit Yiamthaisong, a PhD student at Chiang Mai University's Forest Restoration and Research Unit (Forru), who is working with Birchenko and her Kew colleague Jan Sala. 'I expected a wildlife sanctuary or national park is a protected area. I'm not expecting a lot of agricultural land like this, a lot of fire along the way.' The burning in Umphang Wildlife Sanctuary is hardly an outlier. Wildfires are common in Thailand during the country's spring burning season, when farmers set fields alight to prepare for new crops. Some communities have permission to live and farm plots inside protected areas because of their long-standing presence on the land. Traditionally, burning has helped farmers enrich soil, and fire can be a natural part of a forest's ecosystem. Some seeds rely on fire to germinate. But agricultural burning can quickly spread to adjacent forest – intentionally or by accident. The risks are heightened by the drier conditions of climate change and growing economic pressure on farmers, who are keen to plant more frequently and across larger areas. Experts warn that forests subjected to repeated, high-intensity fires have no chance to regenerate naturally, and may never recover. Sapindus rarak (soapberry) seeds that have been collected for genetic research and seed germination studies. — AFP Fire data based on satellite images compiled by US space agency Nasa shows hotspots and active fires burning across many protected areas in Thailand recently. Around tourist hotspot Chiang Mai, firefighting helicopters drop water on local wildfires, at a cost of thousands of dollars per mission. But remote Umphang is far from the public eye. Park rangers protect the area, but they are frequently underpaid, poorly resourced and overstretched, local environmentalists say. It's a long-standing problem in Thailand, whose Department of National Parks has sometimes closed protected areas in a bid to prevent fires from spreading. The department did not respond to requests for comment. And the challenge is hardly unique to Thailand. Devastating blazes have ravaged wealthy California, Japan and South Korea in recent months. Still, it was a sobering sight for Sala, a seed germination expert at Kew. 'The pristine rainforest that we were expecting to see, it's actually not here any more, it's gone,' he said. 'It really shows the importance of conservation, of preserving biodiversity. Everything is being deforested at a very, very high speed.' Sala and Birchenko work with Kew's Millennium Seed Bank, which holds nearly 2.5 million seeds from over 40,000 wild plant species. An untouched soapberry tree in the Umphang Wildlife Sanctuary. — AFP They want to unlock' knowledge from the seed bank and help partners like Forru, which has spent decades working out how to rebuild healthy forests in Thailand. The partnership will map the genetic structure and diversity of three tree species, predict their resilience to climate change and eventually delineate seed zones in Thailand. 'We hope that some of the population will be more resilient to climate change. And then ... we can make better use of which populations to use for reforestation,' said Sala. Back in Britain, seeds will be germinated at varying temperatures and moisture levels to find their upper limits. Genetic analysis will show how populations are related and which mutations may produce more climate-resilient trees. But first the team needs samples. The scientists are focusing on three species: albizia odoratissima, Phyllanthus emblica – also known as Indian gooseberry – and Sapindus rarak, a kind of soapberry tree. The three grow across different climates in Thailand, are not endangered and have traditionally been used by local communities, who can help locate them. Still, much of the search unfolds something like an Easter egg hunt, with the team traipsing through forest, scanning their surroundings for the leaf patterns of their target trees. 'Ma Sak?' shouts Sala, using the local name for Sapindus rarak, whose fruits were once used as a natural detergent. It's up to Forru nursery and field technician Thongyod Chiangkanta, a former park ranger and plant identification expert, to confirm. Ideally seeds are collected from fruit on the tree, but the branches may be dozens of feet in the air. A low-tech solution is at hand – a red string with a weight attached to one end is hurled towards the canopy and looped over some branches. Shaking it sends down a hail of fruit, along with leaves for Birchenko to analyse. Separate leaf and branch samples are carefully pressed to join the more than seven million specimens at Kew's herbarium. The teams will collect thousands of seeds in all, carefully cutting open samples at each stop to ensure they are not rotten or infested. They take no more than a quarter of what is available, leaving enough for natural growth from the 'soil seed bank' that surrounds each tree. Each successful collection is a relief after months of preparation, but the harsh reality of the forest's precarious future hangs over the team. 'It's this excitement of finding the trees ... and at the same time really sad because you know that 5m next to the tree there's a wildfire, there's degraded area, and I assume that in the next years these trees are going to be gone,' said Sala. The team is collecting at seven locations across Thailand, gathering specimens that are 'a capsule of genetic diversity that we have preserved for the future,' said Birchenko. 'We are doing something, but we are doing so little and potentially also so late.' — AFP
Yahoo
04-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
A Ukrainian Fusion Band Made an Album During the War — On the Frontlines
For anyone who loves free-form avant-jazz, Hyphen Dash's new album, Basement 626, will strike the proverbial experimental chord. Over its 17 tracks, drummer Myshko Birchenko and guitarist/loops player Yevhen Puhachov stretch out into trippy, airy new-age jazz and misty-mountain soundscapes, conjuring the improvised, on-the-fly fusion instrumental records they grew up with. But for anyone who loves the genre, there's also a major difference. The album was recorded about 10 miles from the frontlines of Ukraine's war with Russia. More from Rolling Stone Putin Placates Trump, But Dodges Wider Ukrainian Peace Deal Trump's Threat to Take Over Canada Is a Scandal Is Trump's 'Minerals Deal' a Fossil Fuel Shakedown? Long before Russia invaded the country in 2022, Ukraine had been a base for homegrown versions of punk, indie-rock, hip-hop, and EDM. It's also fostered an active scene of underground experimental musicians brought together by Fusion Jams, a music collective that's been hosting sessions in Kyiv bars and studios since 2019. Among its participants and co-organizers is Birchenko, a 29-year-old drummer who first started playing Green Day covers in local punk bands before being introduced to improvised music thanks to the likes of drummer Mark Guiliana (the award-winning percussionist who played on David Bowie's last recordings). Birchenko juggles several hats: studying government management at the local university, co-running the indie label No Time for Swing, and playing drums for Ukrainian pop star Nadiia Volodymyrivna Dorofieieva, a.k.a. Dorofeeva (who comes across like the Tate McRae of her country). In 2019, he and musician friends also started Hyphen Dash to explore their love of free-form music that broke free of pop constraints. Merely playing that music was a statement in itself, says Marc Wilkins, who is directing a doc, Louder Than Bombs, about the Ukrainian music scene. 'In the Soviet Union, jazz was seen as a symbol of Western decadence and 'bourgeois culture,'' he says. 'After independence, it became largely associated with older generations — a music of the past, for people who smoke cigars and wear bow ties. For Misha and his friends, all in their mid to late twenties, it was a major challenge to reintroduce jazz and instrumental improvisation to a younger Ukrainian audience. It's a perfect example of what defines a certain part of Ukraine's national music scene: the transformation of a once-suppressed genre into something vibrant, independent, and utterly inspiring.' Last November, Birchenko says he and other musicians made a supportive visit to soldiers in Kramatorsk, the city in eastern Ukraine that has been slammed repeatedly by Russian forces. (In 2022, more than 50 civilians, including nine children, were killed when Russian missiles struck a train station.) On a tour of a house where one soldier was stationed, Birchenko was taken into its basement. 'I said, 'This room has great acoustics,'' Birchenko says in fairly fluent English. 'He said it was because the owner was planning to make a theater in the basement for his family and did some acoustic corrections. 'I said, 'Wow, it should be great to record an album here.' And he said, 'If it's not a joke, I will do everything on my side to make it possible.' The military support those projects much better than civilians do. The military says, 'Okay, let's do it tomorrow.' They know we live one day, and maybe tomorrow we will be killed by a rocket or some flying shit.' Taking his friend up on his offer, Birchenko and Puhachov raised $4,000 with the help of the Music Saves Ukraine initiative. 'When Hyphen Dash approached us with this idea, we immediately said yes, as it combines everything we believe in and explores the ever-growing importance of music at times of war and distress,' said the organization's Mariana Mokrynska in a statement. After driving six hours from Kyiv to the house in Kramatorsk, the musicians would eat and sleep on its ground floor and record music in its basement. (Hyphen Dash has other members but the group limited the trip to those two.) 'I was super-afraid about my team, to be honest with you,' says Birchenko, who also brought a video director. 'In Kyiv, you don't feel any connection to the reality. It's not real enough. We were super afraid about which music we would make. It's totally improvisational music, and it takes time. We had to be calm and take a deep breath about us.' Wilkins and another filmmaker, Vadik Pinyagin, would be the only other two people in the basement with Hyphen Dash; Wilkins admits the mood was fraught. 'Despite having been in Ukraine since the full-scale invasion began, I had never been this close to the frontlines,' he says. 'We were staying in a house where an active soldier was stationed, which clearly made it a potential target. I was nervous.' Setting up their guitars, drums, and laptop in the basement, the two spent nearly a week recording 300 hours of freeform jams, many of them one take. Instead of bringing sheet music or demos, they decided to interact with soldiers and the community and make music inspired by it. One of the album's most intense tracks, 'Moto,' conjures the intensity of Red-era King Crimson and was subconsciously inspired by the soldiers around them. 'They have this vibe of tough men, and we decided to play something like this, accidentally,' Birchenko says. 'We said, 'Okay, it will be a rock song.'' (He also says the album did not result in any noise complaints from the neighbors. 'Maybe because we lived in a military house,' he laughs.) Since the basement had a window, the musicians could hear artillery shells in the distance, although those sounds miraculously aren't heard on the album. When they ventured outside, they saw bombed-out buildings, and Puhachov was once jarred by the sound of a very close bomb. ('I was relieved to have a spot in the basement to sleep,' says Wilkins.) At the same time, Birchenko would take morning runs to a market and find locals talking about tomato prices. 'No one's screaming about Putin and the war,' he says. 'They basically get used to the bombs every five seconds.' Sales of Basement 626, which is named for the telephone code in Kramatorsk, will go toward military and civilian rehab centers in Ukraine. Hyphen Dash also has an album of composed music in the wings, and Birchenko admits to a degree of urgency. Thanks to his university enrollment, he can avoid military service only until he graduates in a year and a half. 'You don't have any ways to protect yourself from mobilization, but at the same time, you do a lot of things to support the army,' he says. 'It's super strange. But we will do our stuff to support our people and to spread awareness about war. A lot of people around me are super exhausted and upset with the news. I decided to act, and the only way is to bring some support to the militaries and raise money. I will do so until the war will end.' Best of Rolling Stone The 50 Greatest Eminem Songs All 274 of Taylor Swift's Songs, Ranked The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time
