As Carbon Dioxide Grows, Tropical Trees Do Not
Trees are definitely our allies when it comes to taking in greenhouse gases and thus aiding in the fight against climate change. But new research suggests that forests might not be quite as helpful as we'd hoped.
Computer models that predict how climate change will play out assume that as greenhouse gas concentrations go up, forests will take advantage of the additional carbon dioxide and grow a bit more, increasing their capacity to mitigate global warming.
But after analyzing tens of thousands of tree rings taken from tropical forests in Bolivia, Cameroon and Thailand, an international team of scientists is calling this assumption into question. Their research, published yesterday in the journal Nature Geoscience, found no correlation between increased atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations over the past 150 years and forest growth as evidenced in trees' rings.
Tropical forests "are very important carbon stocks," said lead author Peter van der Sleen of Wageningen University's Forest Ecology and Management Group in Wageningen, Netherlands. But, van der Sleen said, his research does call into question tropical forests' capacity to mitigate climate change.
This finding has the potential to change our climate predictions, explained Lucas Cernusak of the College of Marine and Environmental Sciences at James Cook University in Cairns, Australia.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/as-carbon-dioxide-grows-tropical-trees-do-not/