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Study: North American Forests Aren't Saviors From Climate Change
https://uanews.arizona.edu/story/study-north-american-forests-arent-saviors-climate-change[font face=Serif][font size=5]Study: North American Forests Aren't Saviors From Climate Change[/font]
[font size=4]An unprecedented, UA-led study, combining projections of future climate with more than 2 million tree-ring records spanning all of North America, has resulted in detailed forecast maps for the continent that reveal how forest growth will be impacted by climate change.[/font]
July 20, 2016
[font size=3]Forests take up 25 to 30 percent of human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide — a strong greenhouse gas — and therefore are considered to play a crucial role in mitigating the speed and magnitude of climate change.
However, a new study that combines future climate model projections, historic tree-ring records across the entire continent of North America, and how the growth rates of trees may respond to a higher concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has shown that the mitigation effect of forests probably will be much smaller in the future than previously suggested.
Published this week in the journal Ecology Letters, the study is the first to reveal the possible impact of a changing climate on the growth rate of trees across all of North America — in other words, how their growth changes over time and in response to shifting environmental conditions. The result: detailed forecast maps for the entire North American continent that reveal how forest growth will be impacted by climate change.
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The team was startled to find no evidence for a greenhouse-gas absorbing process called the boreal greening effect in their simulations. Boreal greening refers to the assumption that trees in high latitudes, where colder temperatures limit growth, should benefit from warmer temperatures and higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and, as a result, "green" under the effects of climate change. In turn, these thriving boreal forests should be able to scrub more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, so goes the idea, dampening climate change.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/ele.12650[font size=4]An unprecedented, UA-led study, combining projections of future climate with more than 2 million tree-ring records spanning all of North America, has resulted in detailed forecast maps for the continent that reveal how forest growth will be impacted by climate change.[/font]
July 20, 2016
[font size=3]Forests take up 25 to 30 percent of human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide — a strong greenhouse gas — and therefore are considered to play a crucial role in mitigating the speed and magnitude of climate change.
However, a new study that combines future climate model projections, historic tree-ring records across the entire continent of North America, and how the growth rates of trees may respond to a higher concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has shown that the mitigation effect of forests probably will be much smaller in the future than previously suggested.
Published this week in the journal Ecology Letters, the study is the first to reveal the possible impact of a changing climate on the growth rate of trees across all of North America — in other words, how their growth changes over time and in response to shifting environmental conditions. The result: detailed forecast maps for the entire North American continent that reveal how forest growth will be impacted by climate change.
[center]
[/center]
…
The team was startled to find no evidence for a greenhouse-gas absorbing process called the boreal greening effect in their simulations. Boreal greening refers to the assumption that trees in high latitudes, where colder temperatures limit growth, should benefit from warmer temperatures and higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and, as a result, "green" under the effects of climate change. In turn, these thriving boreal forests should be able to scrub more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, so goes the idea, dampening climate change.
…[/font][/font]