California's Trees Are Dying, and Might Not be Coming Back
Arthur T Knackerbracket and upstart submitted stories that come from the same press release:
Wildfires and climbing temperatures have caused a 6.7 percent decline since 1985:
The State of California is banking on its forests to help reduce planet-warming carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. But that element of the state's climate-change solution arsenal may be in jeopardy, as new research from the University of California, Irvine reports that trees in California's mountain ranges and open spaces are dying from wildfires and other pressures -- and fewer new trees are filling the void.
[...] For the study, the UCI-led team used satellite data from the USGS and NASA's Landsat mission to study vegetation changes between 1985 and 2021. They found that one of the starkest declines in tree cover was in Southern California, where 14 percent of the tree population in local mountain ranges vanished, potentially permanently.
[...] The rate and scale of decline varies across the state. Tree cover in the Sierra Nevada, for instance, stayed relatively stable until around 2010, then began dropping precipitously. The 8.8 percent die-off in the Sierra coincided with a severe drought from 2012 to 2015, followed by some of the worst wildfires in the state's history, including the Creek Fire in 2020.
Fortunately "in the north, there's plenty of recovery after fire," said Wang, perhaps because of the region's higher rainfall and cooler temperatures. But even there, high fire years in 2018, 2020 and 2021 have taken a visible toll.
[...] "This threat to California's climate solutions isn't going away anytime soon," Wang said. "We might be entering a new age of intense fire and vulnerable forests."
Journal Reference:
Jonathan A. Wang et al, Losses of Tree Cover in California Driven by Increasing Fire Disturbance and Climate Stress, AGU Advances (2022). DOI: 10.1029/2021AV000654">10.1029/2021AV000654
Original Submission #1 Original Submission #2
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