Trees live out their lives in surprising ways, massive new study finds
Forests are an essential ally in combating climate change. Trees consume carbon dioxide in order to grow, pulling the gas out of the air and storing it in wood, bark and leaves. But when a tree dies and decomposes, that carbon is set free.
To forecast the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, scientists must accurately model the rate at which forests store and release carbon. This requires understanding how fast tree species grow, how long they live, and what happens when they come together to form a forest.
To address those fundamental questions, an international team of nearly 120 researchers joined forces to build a massive dataset of life histories for trees in forests. Their study, published recently in Science, shows that the lives of trees are more complex than ecologists had thought. The findings could help improve both carbon forecasts and conservation strategies.
“One of the big compelling arguments for why we need to save biodiversity is because natural ecosystems store lots of carbon,” said ecologist Thomas Crowther, founder of the Crowther Lab at ETH Zürich in Switzerland and senior author on the study. “But in order to understand how they store carbon, the most important thing we need to understand is how long that carbon stays within ecosystems.”
