Climate Change Could Be Killing Off These Christmas Trees
By Katherine Tweed
Climate change has the potential to not only rewrite shorelines, alter your morning cup of coffee, and damage the world's chocolate industry, but it could also limit the size of wild Norway spruces, which provide some of the world's most iconic Christmas trees.
As climate change brings smaller snowpacks to the boreal forests that ring the northern hemisphere, trees such as the Norway spruce could suffer limited growth, according to new research published in the journal Forest Ecology and Management.
The snowpack acts as a blanket for tree roots during the cold winter, and removing that can affect shoot growth the next spring. The research adds to a body of work that is trying to understand how forests will be affected by changing climates.
The Finnish ecologists spent two seasons studying a stand of 47-year-old spruce trees. They had a control group of trees that they did not alter, another group that they shoveled snow from, and a third group that they shoveled the snow from and then insulated to delay soil thawing in spring, which is a possibility if the climate continues to warm.
or the trees that had the snow removed and the area was insulated, bud burst was delayed by two weeks for one season but not for as long the following season, which was warmer. The researchers attribute the difference to the fact that there are many factors that affect when trees bud, and air temperature is one of the most important.
It would seem as though the potential warmer air from climate change would offset the benefits of a thick snowpack, but the research suggests that may not be the case. The combination of reduced water uptake due to delayed thawing means the trees had reduced energy available from the process of photosynthesis, and less energy translated for budding and shoot growth.
It was not just water availability that matters in the soil, the researchers found, but damaged root function in the cold soil that led to the limited uptake of water. If conditions like this persisted year-over-year, the trees could grow slower.
https://news.vice.com/article/climate-change-could-be-killing-off-these-christmas-trees
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