New work could help forest managers predict which forests are most at risk from drought and which will survive.
Researchers from UC Davis can now predict which forests could survive despite future drought. Their new method links precipitation to tree growth, and it can help people decide where to put their resources as climate change affects patterns of snow and rainfall that impact the health of forests.
The tool that Au and team developed will help anyone managing forests or using forests to store climate-warming air-borne carbon. That is of growing interest because companies are increasingly investing in forest lands to offset their greenhouse gas emissions. Forests breathe in carbon dioxide from the air and turn the carbon into food, storing it in their trunks, roots and leaves.
Au and team discovered that tipping point by studying a forest devastated by drought in California's southern Sierra Nevada. There, in the years following the record-shattering drought of 2012 to 2015, millions of trees died, as happened across the American West. Au's team linked changes in precipitation during that period to life processes inside the trees, and showed the lag time between the stress of drought and trees' response.
When the drought started in 2012, they found trees continued to appear all right for a few years, as they lived off their reserves. However, by 2015, the trees passed a tipping point: They had used up their reserves, and 80 percent of the trees in that forest were functionally dead. They could no longer convert carbon dioxide into food.
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