The rate of trees dying in the old-growth tropical forests of northern Australia each year has doubled since the 1980s, and researchers say climate change is probably to blame., come from an extraordinary record of tree deaths catalogued at 24 sites in the tropical forests of northern Queensland over the past 49 years.
“Trees are such long-living organisms that it really requires huge amounts of data to be able to detect changes in such rare events as the death of a tree,” says lead author David Bauman, a plant ecologist at the University of Oxford, UK. The sites were initially surveyed every 2 years, then every 3–4 years, he explains, and the analysis focused on 81 key species.
Bauman and his team recorded that 2,305 of these trees have died since 1971. But they calculated that, from the mid-1980s, tree mortality risk increased from an average of 1% a year to 2% a year .Bauman says that trees help to slow global warming because they absorb carbon dioxide, so an increase in tree deaths reduces forests’ carbon-capturing ability. “Tropical forests are critical to climate change, but they’re also very vulnerable to it,” he explains.
The researchers looked at other climate-related trends — including rising temperatures and an estimate of drought stress in soils — but they found that the drying atmosphere had the strongest effect. “What we show is that this increase [in tree mortality risk] also closely followed the increase in atmospheric water stress, or the drying power of air, which is a consequence of the temperature increase due to climate change,” Bauman explains.
Of the 81 tree species that the team studied, 70% showed an increase in mortality risk over the study period, including the Moreton Bay chestnut (
FlorianABusch Tragic
Big oil won best business for Climate! Tell me what universe were in ? Tesla isn’t mentioned! Wtf!
If you don't start planting new ones you'll be quite overwhelmed with runaway greenhouse heat.
Definitely not from the aluminum and barium they’re spraying in the skies to “cool” the earth.
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