Trees play an important part in combating climate change, but Missouri could see drier conditions in coming years. A study seeks to understand the correlation between droughts and forest efficiency. KBIA's Trevor Grandin spoke with Assistant Professor of Biometeorology Jeff Wood about he and his colleagues recent study.
How did you and your colleagues go from this hyper micro scale to a more macro scale of forests in general wilting?
Yeah, the research that I'm involved with, a lot of it pertains to understanding what whole ecosystems do. How they function, how they respond to changes in weather and climate. And so that's kind of the level that I'm working at usually.
And we use a variety of tools to observe the breathing of the whole forest, and then we combine that with other measurements of individual trees or leaves or roots to try to get a finer scale picture and understand the forest from the bottom up, so the breathing of the whole forest. From the top down and then combining that with the bottom-up observations and combining those things to really try to develop a better understanding of how the whole forest functions and so that is kind of, I think, good context for understanding, kind of, how we came at this problem. You know, thinking about mechanisms that explain what you see individual plants doing and but then thinking about, well, how does this scale up to a whole ecosystem like a forest.
And when it comes to, talking about a forest itself wilting, can you kind of define the idea of a wilting forest, and maybe what that looks like to the naked eye?
So, this is going to be a bit different than if you think about the plant that you forgot to water because, you know, these are woody plants. And so, it's not like the tree stem tips over, right? So, the wilting idea has to do more with the leaves. And so, you know, seeing leaves that start to droop a lot more and become flaccid, much like you would expect on a small plant. So, it's a bit harder to see because, you know, the leaves are up in the canopy.
But another thing that occurred during the 2012 drought that we were studying, in particular here, that is kind of beyond the wilting is that the stress got so severe that a lot of the leaves at the top basically died really early and they started to look as if they were turning in the fall. But it was actually just all kinds of dead tissue. And so, they weren't making the chlorophyll that makes the leaves green. And so, it looked like the fall colors had started at the end of August that year. But it was really just that the top layer had died during the drought, so that would be if you were looking down on a very severely stressed forest, you may see that type of color as well.
And you mentioned the 2012 drought, what was so special about that [year], that you decided to go all the way back to 2012 to study that.
Yeah, we're very fortunate this has been a long-term project overall, you know, not this specific paper, but this effort to understand deciduous forests in mid Missouri. These observations started in 2004 and have continued since then. We have these automatic instruments that measure every second of every day, all the time. And so, we supplement that with additional measurements, that people have to go out and make, but we have a very rich historical data set. Some work had been done previously before my time on the project started to look at how changes from year to year in the variability of precipitation influenced the functioning of trees in the forest.
Source: kbia.org
Photo Credit: GettyImages-Paul Hartley
Categories: Missouri, Sustainable Agriculture