[LTER-luq] FW: From ClimateWire -- FORESTS: Climate change, drought turn up heat on U.S. trees

Tue Feb 23 10:02:40 MST 2016

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Subject: From ClimateWire -- FORESTS: Climate change, drought turn up heat on U.S. trees

Climate change, drought turn up heat on U.S. trees

[ClimateWire]<http://www.eenews.net/cw>

AN E&E PUBLISHING SERVICE

FORESTS:
Climate change, drought turn up heat on U.S. trees

Brittany Patterson<http://www.eenews.net/staff/Brittany_Patterson>, E&E reporter

Published: Tuesday, February 23, 2016

New research finds nearly all U.S. forests are now experiencing changes and are vulnerable to future hot, dry and water-scarce conditions.

Published yesterday online in the journal Global Change Biology, the synthesis<http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.13160/abstract> of forest and drought research found the effects of drought have been most pronounced in Western forests.

From 1987 to 2013, the authors wrote, increasing temperatures and shifting rainfall patterns increased the severity of droughts across much of the nation's forests, including in the West, Southeast and states near the Great Lakes region.

Moving forward, forests across the country will experience changes in health, range and the types of tree species living within them.

"I think the value of this report is it shows there is really vulnerability across the nation to increasing drought," said James Clark, lead author of the study and a professor of environmental science at Duke University.

"This paper is about how forests respond to climate, which is a challenging thing to predict, in part because it's hard to predict climate change itself," Clark said.

The study, which analyzed hundreds of published articles, noted that trees respond differently to drought by size and species. But broadly speaking, water stress leads some species to relocate to areas with less drought stress. In addition, some trees will die from water stress and some succumb to insect outbreaks or wildfire.

'Tremendous changes' in the West

Five years into a drought, the effects of water stress on forests in Western states has been extreme.

As many as 58 million trees in California alone are suffering from severe water loss because of drought conditions, according to research by the Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford University (ClimateWire<http://www.eenews.net/climatewire/stories/1060030040/>, Jan. 4).

Research has illuminated some of the reasons. Clark said generally forests in the West have fewer types of tree species, which can contribute to widespread attacks by pathogens like bark beetles. It's also drier in the West.

"We've seen some tremendous changes happen very quickly," he said. "We've seen the loss of whole stands within a period of a few years."

Eastern forests tend to be more diverse and contain more moisture, which often masks the effects of drought. In addition, drought is less common.

The last time severe warm, dry conditions affected forests in the Northeast was in the 1960s, but climate models predict droughts will increase in the region. The authors argued this highlights the need for continued research and data collection that shows how forests, not just trees, handle drought stress.

The researchers found most of the data chronicling how trees respond to drought came from studies that focused on the ways drought impacts individual trees rather than how large swaths, or stands, of forests respond.

Research must focus on the future

Clark likened the current state of forest and drought research to information a public health official might collect on a single patient suffering from a disease: helpful, but patient-specific for the most part.

The information only goes so far in helping doctors determine the trajectory of a regional outbreak.

"At the level of whole stands, it's much more difficult to predict," he said. "Drought has negative effects on a tree but also affects the neighbor trees it's competing with for moisture."

Understanding the distribution of tree species and size of trees within a forest stand is crucial to predicting how future climate change will affect forests. Land managers and researchers try to use models to estimate future impacts; however, models are not great at calculating how trees interact with one another during a drought.

"The size and species structure make it very difficult to translate our understanding of individual tree responses to a prediction of what a forest will do," he said, adding this is where he hopes researchers will turn next.

The review paper is the first of three that will appear as a special feature in the journal summarizing the main findings of the National Climate Assessment. It correlates with a report released earlier this month as part of the U.S. Forest Service's national assessment on the impacts of drought on forests and rangelands (ClimateWire<http://www.eenews.net/climatewire/stories/1060031686>, Feb. 3).

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