Trees in the Australian rainforest are dying at a rate twice as fast as seen in the 1980s due to ill effects of climate change, according to a report by The Guardian.?
This was reported by an international group of researchers from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Centre, Oxford University as well as French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development.?
Researchers have been looking at around 50 years of data -- from 1971 to 2019 using a dataset involving 74,135 trees from 81 different species and 24 forest plots in moist tropical regions of North Queensland.?
They found that annual tree death risk has on average doubled across all plots and species over the period. Even after accounting for tree death due to natural calamities like cyclones, and wind damage, tree mortality stood at the higher levels.?
According to the researchers, it's because global warming has resulted in the atmosphere of North Queensland and other parts of the globe having significantly more 'drying power', compared to the 1980s. With the atmosphere drying, the moisture from the trees is also getting dried up, causing severe water loss in trees, and causing their death.
This will only make it more taxing on trees to conduct carbon capturing, and eventually result in the planet heating up more.?
Dr David Bauman from the IRD, who led the study explained, "It was a shock to detect such a marked increase in tree mortality, let alone a trend consistent across the diversity of species and sites we studied. A sustained doubling of mortality risk would imply the carbon stored in trees returns twice as fast to the atmosphere."
Researchers ask for a better assessment of tree health methods. One example they offer is by remote sensing water content in leaves that could help with the preservation of trees that are on the brink of dying.?
Researchers add in the study, "Such intensified monitoring programmes should improve the representation of mortality risk in vegetation models, a crucial advance to better predict the future pathway of the tropical forest carbon sink."
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