{"id":182,"date":"2009-01-26T17:00:27","date_gmt":"2009-01-26T21:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/?p=182"},"modified":"2009-01-26T17:00:27","modified_gmt":"2009-01-26T21:00:27","slug":"climate-change-doubles-tree-deaths","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/2009\/01\/26\/climate-change-doubles-tree-deaths\/","title":{"rendered":"Climate change doubles tree deaths"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tree deaths have more than doubled in the western U.S. in the past 20-30 years, and the culprit is climate change, according to a paper published Friday in Science<\/a>.\"\"<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Warming has all kinds of consequences for species ranges.\u00a0 Changes in temperature can narrow a species\u2019 range or move it latitudinally through changes in average yearly temperatures and alterations of the growing or reproductive seasons. In the case of trees, other factors mitigated by climate change, such as bark beetles or forest fires, are often blamed for the most tree mortality.<\/span><\/p>\n

In this paper, the researchers collected historical data for more than 6,000 trees dating back to the 1920s. Areas covered in this paper include the Pacific Northwest, California, Idaho, Colorado and Arizona. The researchers say continued climate change alone at current rates will cause a 50 percent reduction in the average tree age in forests, trigger a potential reduction in average tree size and make many forests vulnerable to abrupt dieback.<\/span><\/p>\n

ESA member Nathan Stephenson, a researcher at the USGS Western Ecological Research Center <\/a>and a corresponding author on the paper, thinks that in some cases, increasing tree deaths could indicate forests vulnerable to sudden, extensive die-back, similar to die-back seen over the last few years in parts of the southwestern states, Colorado, and British Columbia.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThat may be our biggest concern,\u201d he said in a press release from the USGS. \u201cIs the trend we\u2019re seeing a prelude to bigger, more abrupt changes to our forests?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Read the Science article here<\/a> (subscription required to view full article); the Washington Post also had a nice article <\/a>on Friday.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tree deaths have more than doubled in the western U.S. in the past 20-30 years, and the culprit is climate change, according to a paper published Friday in Science. Warming has all kinds of consequences for species ranges.\u00a0 Changes in temperature can narrow a species\u2019 range or move it latitudinally through changes in average yearly temperatures and alterations of the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,2],"tags":[60,139,140],"class_list":["post-182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ecology-in-policy","category-research","tag-climate-change","tag-historical-data","tag-trees"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}