UCSB Study - At Least 12 Million Trees In California Killed Drought, Insects, Heat

[hatrack]

?imgmax=800

(UCSB) – A combination of drought, heat and insects is responsible for the death of more than 12 million trees in California, according to a new study from UC Santa Barbara’s National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS). Members of the NCEAS working group studying environmental factors contributing to tree mortality expect this number to increase with climate change.

The study is the first of its kind to examine the wide spectrum of interactions between drought and insects. Lead author William Anderegg, a postdoctoral researcher at the Princeton Environmental Institute, and his coauthors first devised a framework to look at the effects that each stressor can have on tree mortality and then examined interactions among them. The researchers’ findings appear in New Phytologist.

“We wanted to be able to get a sense of how these die-off patterns will shift with climate change,” explained study coauthor Naomi Tague, an associate professor at UCSB’s Bren School of Environmental Science & Management. “Are there huge forests that will be at higher risk of dying sooner?”

The western U.S. has been a hotspot for forest die-offs. Local economies in states like California and Colorado are highly dependent on the nature-based tourism and recreation provided by forests, which offer a scenic backdrop to the skiing, fishing and backpacking opportunities that draw so many people to live and play in the West. But lingering drought, rising temperatures and outbreaks of tree-killing pests such as bark beetles have spurred an increase in widespread tree mortality — especially within the past decade.

EDIT

http://www.desdemonadespair.net/2015/06/drought-heat-and-insects-responsible.html

[msongs]

1. fires, nature's cleaning agent, will remove a lot of this debris if we let it nt