While many individuals are doing their best for climate change by planting new trees to replace those lost to aggressive logging and industrial “progress†by unscrupulous companies, research has shown that the death of large trees has a devastating impact on the climate’s health and ecosystem.
Large trees suffer more than small trees during and after droughts, according to Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Nate McDowell, a renowned forest ecologist and plant physiologist. The recent study, co-authored by McDowell and published in the journal Nature Plants, studied forests worldwide, ranging from semi-arid woodlands to tropic rainforests, to determine how a tree’s size impacts its response to drought.
The research team included researchers from the University of New Mexico and the U.S. Geological Survey and the Smithsonian’s Conservation Biology Institute and Tropical Research Institute, and analysed data from 40 drought events at 38 forest locations whereas previous studies had concentrated on just one site.
The work by McDowell and colleagues has helped clarify many processes, including the fact that because it’s harder for large trees to transport the water and nutrients they need to their leaves, and because evaporative demands are far higher, they are more vulnerable to drought.
Separate analysis was conducted for tropical and temperate forests, broadleaf and needle leaf forests, climates with and without seasonal precipitation flux, and forests with drought deaths not associated with bark beetles, using data from three droughts.
Living trees soak up greenhouse gas and store it, with larger trees releasing more water into the atmosphere, cooling the land and supporting cloud formation, which effects how much solar radiation is reflected back to space and impacts precipitation. According to McDowell, larger trees also play key roles in biodiversity, creating environments on which many plant and animal species are dependent.
According to the study, large trees will suffer the most from a warming climate, drier soils and more severe drought stress, the global consequences of which would be dire to our ecosystem function and biodiversity.
Trees play an important function in the water cycle too, and without them we would suffer even more than we already are from drought and water shortages in various areas, so it is important that we look after our forests to ensure that we have sufficient drinking water and water for other purposes for many aeons to come.
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