#Tropical Trees

[colorsoutofearth]

Close up of Palm leaves (Thrinax radiata)

Photo by Will Burrard-Lucas

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from Smithsonian Magazine:

Last October on the island, Gora, Esquivel-Muelbert and their research team embarked on the first expeditions of the Gigante Project, an ambitious effort to find out what’s killing giant tropical trees around the world. And the island was a great place to start. The largest trees in the research forest are about 1,000 times bigger than the median tree size, Gora says.

Some of the dead or dying giants look like towering skeletons—sunlight streams through the gaping hole in the canopy where their crowns once flourished. Now, they’re leafless and snarled in lianas. At ground level, beetles have moved in, eating away at the trunks and leaving behind sawdust-like piles of frass.

Learning what kills giant trees is a question of increasing urgency. In 2022, a Nature study conducted in Australia suggested that the death rates of tropical trees there have doubled since the 1980s.

The research gives tropical forest ecologists reason to believe that the giant trees are also being affected by this trend. But they don’t know for sure. Existing mortality data is not based on giant tree deaths. In fact, research on tropical trees has historically overlooked giants because their enormous size, long life spans and rarity make it difficult to study them. Therefore, scientists don’t have enough data to understand giant tropical tree mortality, or how it’s shifting due to climate change.

“We have no confidence about what’s going on for these big trees,” Esquivel-Muelbert says.

The Gigante Project seeks to fill that knowledge gap. Esquivel-Muelbert, Gora and their colleagues have launched an international effort to investigate drivers of giant tropical tree mortality, including lightning, wind, drought and disease. But their deaths aren’t the only mystery Gigante hopes to solve.

“If you had to guess, how old do you think the oldest trees in tropical forests are?” Gora asks.

“We don’t know,” he says. “The number of trees that are dated are in the dozens. We have no concept. We don’t even have a ballpark.”

How long does it take for a sapling to become a giant? How long can they live after they reach full size? Which giant tree species appear where? These are just a few of the seemingly endless questions that remain unanswered about giant tropical trees. The Gigante Project will inform the answers to these queries as well. But studying mortality is especially important at this time in Earth’s history, at the precipice of catastrophic warming and biodiversity loss.

Research suggests human-driven climate change is playing an outsized role in increasing the mortality of tropical trees. The 2022 Nature study that showed a doubling of tropical tree mortality since the 1980s identified atmospheric drying triggered by global warming as a likely cause. Growing frequency and intensity of storms, drought and heat are just some of the other mechanisms by which climate change stresses and kills tropical trees.

Because the giant trees have survived for so long through many different pressures, one may assume that they would be more resilient than smaller trees. But while they are more tolerant to stress, their exposure to stress is greater. For example, giant trees are morevulnerable to wind and lightning due to their height, and some evidence suggests their high demand for water may mean they’re more vulnerable to drought, too.

Climate change is likely altering the mortality rates of tropical trees, and this added complexity makes understanding how and why giant ones die more pressing than ever before.

“We know that these temperature increases are occurring everywhere,” says David Bauman, a tropical forest ecologist not involved in the Gigante Project, and lead author on the Nature study.

[crudlynaturephotos]

[tothemettle]

A white Gustava superba, I'd not seen before, usually pale pink. Shrubby tropical tree to maybe 20 feet, dense foliage, Singapore > Thailand flowering Oct > Nov. Flowers > 6" dia, pleasantly perfumed.

[floralfantasy]

Gulmohar season has officially begun. The Delonix Regia tree is native to Madagascar and is found across tropical regions around the world. It is the national flower of St. Kitts and Nevis. 🧡

[reasonsforhope]

The World's Forests Are Doing Much Better Than We Think

You might be surprised to discover... that many of the world’s woodlands are in a surprisingly good condition. The destruction of tropical forests gets so much (justified) attention that we’re at risk of missing how much progress we’re making in cooler climates.

That’s a mistake. The slow recovery of temperate and polar forests won’t be enough to offset global warming, without radical reductions in carbon emissions. Even so, it’s evidence that we’re capable of reversing the damage from the oldest form of human-induced climate change — and can do the same again.

Take England. Forest coverage now is greater than at any time since the Black Death nearly 700 years ago, with some 1.33 million hectares of the country covered in woodlands. The UK as a whole has nearly three times as much forest as it did at the start of the 20th century.

That’s not by a long way the most impressive performance. China’s forests have increased by about 607,000 square kilometers since 1992, a region the size of Ukraine. The European Union has added an area equivalent to Cambodia to its woodlands, while the US and India have together planted forests that would cover Bangladesh in an unbroken canopy of leaves.

Logging in the tropics means that the world as a whole is still losing trees. Brazil alone removed enough woodland since 1992 to counteract all the growth in China, the EU and US put together. Even so, the planet’s forests as a whole may no longer be contributing to the warming of the planet. On net, they probably sucked about 200 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year between 2011 and 2020, according to a 2021 study. The CO2 taken up by trees narrowly exceeded the amount released by deforestation. That’s a drop in the ocean next to the 53.8 billion tons of greenhouse gases emitted in 2022 — but it’s a sign that not every climate indicator is pointing toward doom...

More than a quarter of Japan is covered with planted forests that in many cases are so old they’re barely recognized as such. Forest cover reached its lowest extent during World War II, when trees were felled by the million to provide fuel for a resource-poor nation’s war machine. Akita prefecture in the north of Honshu island was so denuded in the early 19th century that it needed to import firewood. These days, its lush woodlands are a major draw for tourists.

It’s a similar picture in Scandinavia and Central Europe, where the spread of forests onto unproductive agricultural land, combined with the decline of wood-based industries and better management of remaining stands, has resulted in extensive regrowth since the mid-20th century. Forests cover about 15% of Denmark, compared to 2% to 3% at the start of the 19th century.

Even tropical deforestation has slowed drastically since the 1990s, possibly because the rise of plantation timber is cutting the need to clear primary forests. Still, political incentives to turn a blind eye to logging, combined with historically high prices for products grown and mined on cleared tropical woodlands such as soybeans, palm oil and nickel, mean that recent gains are fragile.

There’s no cause for complacency in any of this. The carbon benefits from forests aren’t sufficient to offset more than a sliver of our greenhouse pollution. The idea that they’ll be sufficient to cancel out gross emissions and get the world to net zero by the middle of this century depends on extraordinarily optimistic assumptions on both sides of the equation.

Still, we should celebrate our success in slowing a pattern of human deforestation that’s been going on for nearly 100,000 years. Nothing about the damage we do to our planet is inevitable. With effort, it may even be reversible.

-via Bloomburg, January 28, 2024

[turndecassette2]

[andallshallbewell]

[spaceagecats]

Spelunking on Whale Island

Honestly just using this as an excuse to paint this whole environment lmAO I love rendering trees n foliage..