Climate Change Is Making Trees Grow Faster

“The disappearance of larch would be a disaster to the forest ecosystem in this region,” said Xianliang Zhang, an ecologist at Shenyang Agricultural University in Shenhang, China, and lead author of the new study. The authors suspect the oldest trees have seen the most growth because they have a more developed root system that can suck up more nutrients in the short-term. “Their arguments make a lot of logical sense in terms of why the trees might benefit from the increased winter ground surface temperatures, which is that especially things like an earlier spring thaw could really help trees get growing earlier, more ability to have root activity in the cold months, these sort of things would make sense in why trees would benefit from warmer winters in particular,” aid Erika Wise, an associate professor of geography at the University of North Carolina — Chapel Hill, who was not involved in the new study.

Source: interestingengineering.com