New research has made significant strides in understanding how coniferous forest ecosystems may respond to climatic changes. The study investigates the relationship between tree-ring indices (TRI) and the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) in the context of climate, topography, and soil conditions.
Plants emit odours for a variety of reasons, such as to communicate with each other, to deter herbivores or to respond to changing environmental conditions. An interdisciplinary team of researchers carried out a study to investigate how biodiversity influences the emission of these substances. For the first time, they were able to show that species-rich forests emit less of these gases into the atmosphere than monocultures.
New research reveals that deforestation in the Amazon not only warms immediate surroundings but also impacts areas up to 100 kilometers away. Analyzing data from 2001 to 2020, the study links regional forest loss to a significant temperature rise—4.4 °C in areas with both local and regional deforestation. The findings emphasize the critical importance of understanding how Amazon deforestation contributes to climate change and highlight the potential benefits of reducing deforestation for local, regional, and national scales.
Urban environments have become hotspots for understanding how rapid evolution occurs in response to extreme environmental changes. These habitats exert selective pressures on resident organisms that impact their evolutionary trajectories. Recently, researchers from Japan investigated how the creeping woodsorrel plant might adapt in response to elevated temperatures that result from urbanization. Understanding these effects can help predict evolutionary traits to manage plant evolution in the face of shifting climatic conditions.
For several years, ecological research has argued that climate often has no determining influence on the distribution of forests and savannas in tropical regions. However, an international research team has now succeeded in proving that it depends mostly on climatic factors whether regions in Africa are covered by forest or savanna. The study, confirms the dominant role of climate in the formation of global vegetation patterns.
Some southern beeches in the Andes have plumbed deeper for moisture as the surface has dried up. But doing so may deplete resources and undermine the trees’ future health.
The study reveals a relatively stable sugar-starch partitioning pattern in mountain trees across the world, which predominately modulates the balance of carbon assimilates between supply and demand. It provides implications for understanding how trees respond to climate change in terms of carbon ecophysiology.
Growing edible mushrooms alongside trees can produce a valuable food source for millions of people while capturing carbon, mitigating the impact of climate change, a new study has found.
Using commercial, high-resolution satellite images and artificial intelligence, an international team mapped almost 10 billion individual trees in Africa’s drylands to assess the amount of carbon stored outside of the continent’s dense tropical forests. The result is the first comprehensive estimate of tree carbon density in the Saharan, Sahel, and Sudanian zones of Africa. The data are free and publicly available.
Trees living in conditions where the carbon dioxide (CO2) has been artificially elevated are likely to become more efficient in conserving water.
