Trees up to four years to recover from drought – Trade

tree need two to four years to recover their growth rates after droughts severe, a greater period established by global models linking climate and vegetation, and assume an almost immediate recovery, according to a study published in the journal “Science”.

The research suggests that forests as a result of the slow recovery after one of these phenomena, they are able to store less carbon than they had calculated and this would imply that the advance of Climate Change can be also faster than previously thought.

According The study, led by William RL Anderegg, University of Utah (USA), l os forests play an important role in buffering the climate change caused by human activities tree set much of the CO2 through photosynthesis and then process and store some of that synthesized carbon as wood.

“If forests are not as good retaining carbon dioxide, this means that the climate change could be accelerated, “says the specialist in a press release from the university said.

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To reach these conclusions, researchers analyzed a global database growth tree (International Tree Ring Data Bank), a constructed from measurements of growth rings provided base Scientists around the world.

In particular, they studied the recovery of these plants more than 1,300 non-tropical forests after the severe droughts in the second half of the twentieth century, including 2003 in the Central Europe.

Dendrochronology is the science that studies the growth rings in the trunks of the tree and by dendrochronological techniques the researchers were able to reconstruct the growth after droughts. Thus, it was possible to get an idea of ​​how forests convert carbon over time.

Once it established the years it took for the tree to recover, researchers They compared the data with calculations of the theoretical models of climate and vegetation.

Thus, according to this study, the growth was about 9% lower than expected during the first year of recovery and 5 % lower in the second year. The effects of the drought were most pronounced in families Pinaceae (pines and other conifers) and in semiarid areas

According Anderegg, the impact on CO2 storage capacity “is not insignificant. For more a century, the carbon storage capacity of arid ecosystems would be reduced by 1.6 gigatons, an amount greater than the total carbon emissions related to energy produced in the US in one year. ”

Source: EFE