Go west, young pine: US forests shifting with climate change
Source: Associated Press
Go west, young pine: US forests shifting with climate change
By SETH BORENSTEIN
50 minutes ago
WASHINGTON (AP) — A warmer, wetter climate is helping push dozens of Eastern U.S. trees to the north and, surprisingly, west, a new study finds.
The eastern white pine is going west, more than 80 miles (130 kilometers) since the early 1980s. The eastern cottonwood has been heading 77 miles north (124 kilometers), according to the research based on about three decades of forest data.
The northward shift to get to cooler weather was expected, but lead author Songlin Fei of Purdue University and several outside experts were surprised by the move to the west, which was larger and in a majority of the species.
New trees tend to sprout farther north and west while the trees that are farther south and east tend to die off, shifting the geographic center of where trees live. Think of it as a line of people stretching, said Fei.
Detailed observations of 86 different tree species showed, in general, the concentrations of eastern U.S. tree species have shifted more than 25 miles west (45 kilometers) and 20 miles (33 kilometers) north, the researchers reported in the journal Science Advances on Wednesday.
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Read more: https://apnews.com/5f681360340d44edb24ca003cffddb5a/Go-west,-young-pine:-US-forests-shifting-with-climate-change
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Related: Divergence of species responses to climate change (Science Advances)
