Global team of scientists determine 'fingerprint' for how much heat, drought is too much for forests

How hot is it, and how dry is it? The answers were found by looking at decades of dying trees.

The first global database of precisely mapped forest die-off events was published in the journal Nature Communications. The study compares the data from the climate data to the data from the forest to see if the heat and dry conditions caused the tree mortality episodes.

The study collected data from previous studies to document where and when trees died.

The pattern emerged after the climate analysis was done.

We found that there was a consistently hotter, drier pattern at the global scale.

He says the fingerprints show that forest mortality events occur when the weather gets even hotter and driest.

The global forest mortality is linked to intensified climate extremes.

He says that higher temperatures would double the number of tree-killing droughts around the world.

Plants do a great job of capturing and sequestering carbon, but death of the plants prevents them from doing so.

It is critical to understand how hot is and how dry is because of the reliance on trees and other plants to capture and sequester carbon, as some proposed climate solutions suggest.

One of the study's co-authors, Cuauht, offered an example of how recent climate patterns affected.

The dry and warm March to May season is even more dry than usual, but it is also warmer than ever. More than 8,000 mature trees were killed by bark beetles in the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve in Central Mexico. The result of the La NiF1a Pacific Ocean stream was a combination of dry and warmer conditions that favored pest outbreaks.

The website of the International Tree Mortality Network has an interactive application that allows others to submit additional observations of forest mortality.

The organization was founded and coordinated by co-author of the book, and is a collaborative effort between scientists on every forested continent and aims to coordinate international research efforts on forest die-off events. The data management group leader is Hammond.

The paper will create a bit of urgency around the need to understand the role of warming on forest mortality. Current climate modeling and remote-sensing research communities need ground-truthed datasets to verify their predictions of important processes. The data was brought together for the first time so that we could ask a question like this at the planetary scale.

They are EXPLAINERS.

"georeferenced"

Scientists assign real-world coordinates to maps and aerial images.

Ground-truthed.

Information can be verified by direct observation and measurement. Machine learning refers to checking results for accuracy.

More information: Global field observations of tree die-off reveal hotter-drought fingerprint for Earth's forests, Nature Communications (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-29289-2 Journal information: Nature Communications Citation: Global team of scientists determine 'fingerprint' for how much heat, drought is too much for forests (2022, April 5) retrieved 5 April 2022 from https://phys.org/news/2022-04-global-team-scientists-fingerprint-drought.html This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.