Trees up to four years to recover from drought – ElTiempo.com

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

Research suggests that forests as a result of the slow recovery from one of these phenomena, are able to store less carbon which had been calculated and this would imply that the advance of climate change can also be faster than previously thought.

According to the study, led by William RL Anderegg, University of Utah (USA), forests play a very important role in buffering of climate change caused by human activity: trees set much of the CO2 through photosynthesis and then process and store some of that synthesized carbon in wood.

“If forests are not as good retaining carbon dioxide, this means that climate change could accelerate,” says the specialist in a press said University Press.

The study

To reach these conclusions, researchers analyzed a global database of growth trees (International Tree Ring Data Bank), a constructed from measurements of growth rings provided by scientists worldwide basis.

In particular, 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 center of Europe.

Dendrochronology is the science growth rings in tree trunks and through 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 established the years it took to the trees to recover, the researchers 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 the storage of CO2 “no It is negligible: for over 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. “

EFE