Bob Yirka is a writer for Phys.org.
Credit: Lin Meng.
The grand prize winner of this year's Science &SciLifeLab Prize for Young Scientists was Lin Meng, who conducted research on how bright city lights can affect the growth of trees. In her paper, which was published in the journal Science, she describes her study of satellite data showing green areas in cities along with artificial light sources and trees growing in the Alps.
Research has shown that higher temperatures can affect vegetation growth. In this new effort, Meng wondered if city warming and global warming might be causing trees to green up in the spring. She obtained and analyzed satellite data that showed when trees begin to produce leaves in the spring in 85 US cities.
She found that tree green-up happens 6 days earlier in urban areas than in rural areas. She found that trees in the city respond to climate change faster than trees in rural areas.
The impact of bright lights on trees and whether they can make trees start growing their leaves earlier in the spring were some of the questions asked by Meng. She studied trees growing in the Alps in Europe, which has a uniform temperature distribution but also has changing lengths of daylight across latitudes. She found evidence of a reduction in the early green-up due to global warming. She studied the data from NASA's Black Marble satellite, which measures artificial light in cities, as well as phenology data from the USA National Phenology Network. She found that artificial light pushed spring green-up by nine days in the most extreme cases, and that she was able to compare conditions in both cities.
Adding to the impact of earlier greening due to global warming is the suggestion that artificial light leads to additions of earlier spring greening in cities.
Science has more information about Lin Meng, Green with phenology. There is a science.abm8136
Science journal information.
The Science X Network will be launched in 2021.
How warm weather or bright lights can influence tree greening was retrieved from a news story on tree greening.
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