| Title | Older Forests Resist Change | |
| Date | Monday June 10 2019, @12:20AM | |
| Author | chromas | |
| Topic | ||
| from the conservative-old-growth dept. | ||
Older forests in eastern North America are less vulnerable to climate change than younger forests—particularly for carbon storage, timber production, and biodiversity—new University of Vermont research finds.
The study, to be published in Global Change Biology's June 12 edition, analyzed how climate change is expected to impact forests across the eastern United States and Canada. It found that increased forest age reduces the climate sensitivity of forest carbon, timber, and biodiversity to projected increases in temperature and precipitation. In other words, increased age helps to safeguard forests from climate change.
[...] Analyzing large amounts of field data from 18,500 forest plots—from Minnesota to Maine, and Manitoba to Nova Scotia—the study identifies priority regions for forest climate adaption efforts. Younger forests east and southeast of the Great Lakes were less resilient to climate change, showing projected declines in carbon storage, timber and biodiversity.
[...] While the study found that forests' climate resiliency increased with age, scientists often characterize older forests as over the age of 150 years. Older forests are more structurally complex, with trees growing at multiple heights and larger canopy gaps, which free up growing space and increasing light availability for a mix of species.
I would think that the "old growth" forests would be in the less-accessible, higher elevations (think in the mountains) so that might have something to do with it, too. Right?
The climate sensitivity of carbon, timber, and species richness covaries with forest age in boreal–temperate North America (DOI: 10.1111/gcb.14656)
| Links |
printed from SoylentNews, Older Forests Resist Change on 2024-04-23 14:34:27