Dear MEL Topic Readers,
Climate change: trees grow for extra month as planet warms – study
We know that trees are sensitive to local climate conditions, such as rain and temperature. For example, tree rings usually grow wider in warm, wet years and they are thinner in years when it is cold and dry. Indeed, tree rings give us some information about that area’s local climate in the past and recent years. Recently, scientists have studied trees in a forest in Ohio, USA, and compared the data with an old record kept by a local farmer between 1883 and 1912, when the climate hadn’t been affected so much by global warming. They found that leaves nowadays stay on trees about 15% longer than they did in those pre-industrial days. This means trees nowadays have a substantially longer growing season than about a century ago. Can you imagine human activities have extended trees’ growing period by 15% just in 100 years? Though this means those leaves absorb carbon dioxide more from the atmosphere, such temperature fluctuation might cause stress to the trees as well as the biodiversity of the surrounding environment. As we’ve already witnessed cherry blossoms bloom a week or two earlier than decades ago, global warming seems to cause much more significant impacts on flora than we’ve realized, or admitted.
Read the article and learn about the impact on trees by global warming.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-65037659
Climate change: trees grow for extra month as planet warms – study
We know that trees are sensitive to local climate conditions, such as rain and temperature. For example, tree rings usually grow wider in warm, wet years and they are thinner in years when it is cold and dry. Indeed, tree rings give us some information about that area’s local climate in the past and recent years. Recently, scientists have studied trees in a forest in Ohio, USA, and compared the data with an old record kept by a local farmer between 1883 and 1912, when the climate hadn’t been affected so much by global warming. They found that leaves nowadays stay on trees about 15% longer than they did in those pre-industrial days. This means trees nowadays have a substantially longer growing season than about a century ago. Can you imagine human activities have extended trees’ growing period by 15% just in 100 years? Though this means those leaves absorb carbon dioxide more from the atmosphere, such temperature fluctuation might cause stress to the trees as well as the biodiversity of the surrounding environment. As we’ve already witnessed cherry blossoms bloom a week or two earlier than decades ago, global warming seems to cause much more significant impacts on flora than we’ve realized, or admitted.
Read the article and learn about the impact on trees by global warming.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-65037659
No comments:
Post a Comment