There are one or two nice people from Switzerland (assuming you are there, just guessing from comments) on bonsainut if you are looking for local resources and helpful people. A decent-sized collection like that is a real testament to unbroken continuity (especially during the growing season where you can't skip a day or even a few hours sometimes), other hobbyists can help you fill the gap when situations come up. Stop by the r/bonsai beginners thread any time if you wanna talk trees!
It affects seedling recruitment for sure. Some species love to start beneath leaf mulch and there is probably something out there that would colonize your leaf field hard and fast if it were given the chance. I collect red alder seedlings in timber clearcutting areas, and often find that they've had to twist/push their way through 6-12" of slash (clearcutting debris) to reach light and finally grow upwards. Quite a few conifers can push upward through many inches of needle duff as well.
It occurs to me that blackberries have entered the discussion. :D They seem to be the prime thing that doesn't give a crap about leaf cover around here.
I think conserving energy in cold months is close to the biggest factor.
Regarding the dropping of biomass, in both deciduous and evergreen species, some of the substances from the retiring leaves/needles are reclaimed by trees ("retranslocation") and pulled out of the leaf before letting go of the leaf. In species like pines it'll be the second or third (or older, sometimes much older) retiring needles and in species like maple or beech it'll the be the entire foliage. Mass useful to soil ecosystems still falls but the tree grabs what it can in the late months of the year, hence the color change.
One thing the grandparent comment doesn't talk about much is the cost (in sugar) of both building and thereafter maintaining leaves and the related tradeoffs. Building a fully winter-tolerant broadleaf is more expensive sugar-wise than building a winter-interolerant leaf. A sugar maple in Quebec, where the season is shorter than (say) Oregon is going to compete in its niche better if it can attain surface area quickly at the start of the growing season, and that is better done with a winter-intolerant, more relatively delicate leaf. An evergreen leaf takes more time and mass to build and has to have more limited surface area or armor (cuticle) to tolerate such winters.
Winter root growth is widely-observed amongst people who work with tree roots annually (bonsai hobbyists and professionals, commercial ornamental tree growers, especially propagation-adjacent roles) in milder temperate climates (eg: Pacific Northwest).
In my time studying bonsai (past 7-10y) in every winter (Jan-Mar) I've repotted (anywhere from partial to full bare rooting, partial to full root structure editing) many PNW-native deciduous trees (alders, bigleaf + vine maples, cottonwoods, etc) as well as non-PNW-native deciduous (birches, beeches, elms, maples, hazels, hornbeams, stewartia, bald cypress, cherries/plums, quinces, snowbells, etc). In somewhat-mild-and-milder climates there is always some root growth going on. Such winter root growth is much more aggressive in conifers, particularly pines, but also in spruces, cypress-family species (junipers).
Here's a diagram from a paper showing scots pine and rowan/ash adding either root or vegitative growth in various parts of the year:
Temperate trees collect or spend carbon in the warm parts of the year, i.e. between bud-break and mid-summer. In cooler parts of the year, they do various things: store it in the wood, move it around (redistribution + retranslocation), spend it (future-season buds + cambium + root expansion) or carefully avoid spending it (dormancy).
Even in these periods they're still collecting sunlight if they can, quite a few deciduous species can photosynthesize at least a little bit directly through their bark -- young twigs have much thinner bark even in trees that get very rough bark (eg: black cottonwood). And evergreens are collecting sunlight any time mild-or-warmer conditions are in play.
Trees are active in some shape or form any time they are able to be. If you live in USDA hardiness zone 7 or warmer and have trees/shrubs outside you can notice this more easily than in colder climates (where the grow/no-grow seasons are more sharply bounded). Roots are not the only thing expanding in winter. Take a picture every day of a branch on a deciduous or evergreen tree and you'll see bud expansion.
Yeah but they aren't making this clear and see people misinterpreting this not realizing that it is in temperate forests only. I don't see how any tree roots can be formed when frost line is feet below the surface.
It's not even that. It's a proof-of-concept example for generating continuous LOD meshes, which is something that Nanite does, but it isn't all that it does.
"This library serves as a quick placeholder or learning tool, demonstrating the basics of creating continuous LOD data."
Hmm, it's been a few years since I read through the amazing Nanite slide deck. Presumably this also renders the meshes, right? What else does Nanite do?
- software rasterization for small single pixel triangles which reduces quad overdraw
- deferred materials (only material IDs and some geometry properties are written in the geometry pass to the gbuffers, which things like normal maps, base colour, roughness maps, etc being applied later with a single draw call per material)
- efficient instancing and batching of meshes and their mesh patches to allow arrows of objects to scale well as object count grows
- (edit, added later as I forgot) various streaming and compression techniques to efficiently stream/load at runtime and reduce runtime memory usage and bandwidth like vertex quantization etc.
The Nanite tech also contains the virtual geometry / mega geometry streaming component.
Also the rendering component, which in addition to triangulating the cLOD data, also handles batching and optimisation of material draw calls, lighting and shadow casting, among other things.
I've studied bonsai with a professional who trained in Japan for a number of years. Bonsai is a well-developed professional craft that should be learned from people who already know it rather than guessed at from absolute first principles (or from completely illiterate/nonsensical web slop, whether AI or not), as most beginners unfortunately try to do.
The known-good techniques that produced long-term bonsai don't in any way whatsoever resemble the naive approach of "trimming" in the hedge pruning sense. This (along with the mistake of growing indoors) is why the vast majority of the public concludes bonsai is a dark art / impossible. Guessing at bonsai is like throwing rocks at a computer hoping that C code will just "happen" somehow.
If you have a sun-facing outdoor garden, know what the term "binary tree" means, and can describe a tree in terms of a data structure (nodes etc), then you have within you the ability to learn bonsai for realsies if you make contact with people who do it in real life. Olive bonsai trees are relatively common in mediterranean-climate bonsai scenes, like that of California's bonsai scene: https://bonsaitonight.com/2023/10/20/preparing-an-olive-for-...
Trees like this are not grown on kitchen counters or in living rooms. _Maybe_ in a world-beating cannabis tent, but the hassle is extreme, and (going back to the topic of this thread), fighting diseases in the indoor cultivation environment is much much harder than outside.
Pines have a hard time pulling on the water chain due to their needle design (silhouette/waxy coating). To move water to a location on a pine branch, you usually need needles or a strong tip bud that was already emerging just as the needles were lost (i.e. the needles already drew a lot of sap to that location just before their demise). If at a given junction you can trace to a descendant shoot that is green / has needles, then the live vein traces through that junction. If no descendant shoot with needles, you're looking at dead wood and inspecting under the bark won't find any trace of green cambium, or only fading cambium.
I am not an immigration lawyer. Something you should be aware of is that when applying for a green card, your status as a Canadian (whether permanent resident or citizen) or as a Brit (ditto) is completely irrelevant. The green card process sees your application solely through the lens of your birth country. The GC backlog for Chinese-born people is very lengthy. So lengthy that it tests the longevity of a visa or a set of visas -- it's not a marathon you want to still be running 15 to 20 years from now.
For that reason, if your goal is ultimately the US, focus on the US, because you will otherwise be adding _many_ years to the process.
One very notable asterisk to the above: If, while applying for a GC, your spouse is from a no-backlog country (born in Canada, UK, or other no-backlog countries), then your application can essentially adopt that country as the birth country, and you can get through the GC process in a relatively short time (all other things equal).
From your perspective "good timing for a green card application" is ASA-F'ing-P.
Yes, HK is treated as its own country for chargeability purposes, which AFAIK has never been subject to additional delays. Macau is treated as part of Portugal, so it will also never have limitations.
Both of those are specifically provided by Congress as exceptions to the general rule of charging to the current sovereign of the place of birth.
Correct. Hong Kong is the correct country of chargeability so the process, particularly if an NIW-based green card is pursued, would be around two years based on current green card backlogs and processing times. The problem with TN status for those pursuing green cards is that because of the current backlogs, you might be in the difficult position of needing to travel or extend your TN while you are in the green card process but bot far enough along such that could get temporary travel authorization. You would not be able to travel or extend your TN.
I am not a lawyer. The transition from TN->GC is possible too under the right (narrow) circumstances. The big tradeoff is not risking travel while within the lifecycle of one TN term, and likely not being able to straddle a GC application across the boundaries of a TN renewal period at all. For some countries of birth, a TN term is not long enough to get through the GC pipeline. But for Canadians born in Canada, ones who have family willing to visit them instead of the other way around, it may be doable. Or for folks born in other countries which have no GC backlog or a short one. YMMV, but I have personally seen someone go L2->TN->GC. An unusual sequence but necessary given the particulars of that case.
It's totally possible to go from TN to GC but you won't be able to leave the United States from the point you file your I140/I485 until your Advanced Parole document turns up. You also can't get a new TN should you need one.
Much like the other commenter, I learned to never ever do any of this stuff (ordinary travel or renewals) via land crossings. You can have a major trajectory change to your life on the whims of a border guard who is just having a bad day even if all of your ducks are lined up and perfectly documented by a large multinational. Bend over backwards to avoid land crossings until you can secure yourself a greencard.
It doesn't really matter which crossing, IME, you may always encounter a power-tripping officer, and officers at each kind of entry port have the same power. I've been waved through no questions asked at land crossings, pulled into secondary and interviewed by 6 officers in pairs of 2 at an air crossing - and vice versa. Ultimately, admission is at the discretion of the officers unless you're a citizen. Even a green card holder can be denied re-entry on the basis that they 'abandoned their residency.'
Understood -- the big multinational I was working for employed an immigration law firm that tracked many such crossings, and they practically begged me not to try crossing by land based on their statistics (which suggested a higher probability of trouble in land crossings). I joined that statistic and learned to never take any chances with any part of this.
Speaking from a Canadian perspective, US flights from Canadian airports (and a select few others) almost exclusively go through pre-clearance. This means you do US customs and immigration on Canadian soil before boarding your flight into the US, and the plane lands in the US as a domestic flight. It's not much different than a land border.
> If you flew in on a plane, they have to get you deported which costs money and energy.
Being denied entry can be quite summary, no proceedings, for most people. Admission is broadly at the discretion of the border officer and recourse for most people is either heavily limited or just straight up zero.
Note that for flights from non-preclearance countries, the airlines are fined if you're not admitted (averaging $3500 at the time of writing but I think closer to $10000 now). I believe they're responsible for paying your way back too. [1] In fact I think USCIS even tried to fine United after paroling a traveler during a transit that wouldn't have otherwise been permitted.
> Even a green card holder can be denied re-entry on the basis that they 'abandoned their residency.'
I don't believe CBP is allowed to deny a green card holder entry on this basis if you provide any evidence that amounts to a colorable claim of being an LPR, such as a physical green card. They are allowed to pressure you to officially give up your status by convincing you to sign an I-407, but you have the right to decline that and insist on being let into the country because you believe you did not abandon your residency. In turn, CBP could choose to refer you to an immigration judge, but this would still involve letting you in.
If they do want to bother with the referral, CBP would take the physical green card, give you alternate proof of status, give you a Notice To Appear for removal proceedings before an immigration judge, and let you in with all the same rights as any other green card holder on a tentative basis. Yes, the immigration judge would still revoke permanent residency if you are found to have abandoned your residency, but you have the chance to involve your immigration lawyer and argue your case before the immigration courts. And there might be a long wait before you even get the court date in the first place.
I am not a lawyer or other immigration professional and am speaking generally here based on general information. If you think you might be in a situation where this would happen to you, consult an actual professional for proper legal advice applicable to your case.
> Even a green card holder can be denied re-entry on the basis that they 'abandoned their residency.'
If you're actually living in the US and just taking occasional vacations abroad this is extremely unlikely.
Where people get caught out is when they're trying to basically snowbird between two countries while still on a green card. In that case it's better to first serve your 6 years in the US to earn citizenship. Then you're free to go anywhere anytime you want.
If you want to 'snowbird' like that without waiting for (or ever planning to get) citizenship, you can apply for an I-327 Re-Entry Permit. [1]
You can apply with form I-131 and like $575.
While it can take 3-12 months to process, if you apply more than 60 days before travel and complete your biometrics appointment, you can leave and pick it up at a foreign embassy or consulate. This helps you avoid the presumption that you abandoned your US residency.
Very true. But the point the OP is making is that your entire fate is in the hands of a CBP officer and they are a very, very mixed bunch.
I repeat OP's advice to avoid a land crossing, I'm not sure exactly what it is but I suspect partly that land crossings have much less time pressure. I've had my car pulled over and partly taken apart looking for "anything suspicious". We were two men in our mid twenties and I think the agents were just bored, honestly.
After 180 days you're deemed to be seeking a new admission under INA 101(a)(13)(C) which means you're subject to the grounds of inadmissibility on that basis alone. [1] And after 1 year away, it's not a "you should get a REP" it's a "you definitely have to unless you have a medical reason for not being able to come back sooner because they won't let you in without a returning resident visa."
> A permanent resident (called lawful permanent resident or LPR) or conditional resident (CR) who has remained outside the United States for longer than one year, or beyond the validity period of a Re-entry Permit, will require a new immigrant visa to enter the United States and resume permanent residence. A provision exists under U.S. visa law for the issuance of a returning resident special immigrant visa to an LPR who remained outside the United States due to circumstances beyond his/her control. [2]
More than 6 months interrupts your continuous residency for citizenship purposes unless can defend your continued residency during that period, and I am led to believe a REP helps.
Personally I'd err on the side of caution and say if you're regularly away for long periods or if you plan to be away for more than 6 months, it's probably worth the REP. I think any extended or regular absences should probably be regarded with a little more weight than 'it's fine' although most people probably do. If I were gone for more than 6 months I'd expect a pretty significant grilling.
