The SUNY Research Foundation: New Sensors Can Track Our Trees’
Response to Global Warming
Published:
Monday, March 9, 2015 - 14:25
I wanted to share with you the following article that was published by The Research Foundation:
More pulp. More paper. More lumber. Could increased timber production as a result of a longer growing season and other factors be a silver lining to the dreaded phenomenon of global warming?
According to Andrei Lapenas, associate professor of climatology at the University at Albany, that is the hope of many, yet the dream may be nothing more than wishful thinking.
“You might expect that trees, in response to warming, would grow faster and that we would have more timber and everything would be just fine,” he said. “However, it appears that trees are using this warm period to invest more into fine roots instead of into timber.”
To find out for sure how trees are responding to warming, Lapenas—who studies coniferous trees in boreal forests—set out to investigate where trees are allocating carbohydrates, or sugars, which comprise the currency that trees use for growth and metabolic activity. Unfortunately, no instrument existed that could directly measure allocation of carbohydrates in trees.
Posted: February 26, 2015
