What’s currently happening in forests: A perspective on how trees coping with the changes in climate.

The grassland on the top of Vosges Mountains, France. Personal documentation.

The impacts of climate change have been quite dramatically discussed in the past few years, but in 2019, the matters were just being put in the middle of a table for everyone to take a little bit of it to be talked over in their evening coffee table meeting with their coworkers. They talk about how the impacts are already quite clear and how they’re already happening now. They saw it on the news or in their twitter timeline. It’s in everyone’s daily conversation. And forestry has been one of the things that people now believe should be put in priority to combat climate change.

Not combatting climate change will lead to long-term changes in the natural and climate system. These changes have driven the changes of the organism living on Earth; forests are non-exception. Trees that make up the forests are important to combat climate change because they absorb carbon from the atmosphere. At the same time, the changes in climate will change how trees behave too, and it may lead to some unfriendly consequences, such as the extinction of some species. And that is why to save the trees from extinction while manage them to keep absorbing carbon, many people have committed to assist the trees in going through this anxious moment.

The effects of climate change are more regional and dependent on where the forests stand. The countries in the Northern hemisphere might’ve been experiencing a longer and warmer growing season than it was in some decades ago which provides the trees to start growing their body parts at an earlier time and to keep growing for a longer time. However, the warm and long growing season might be followed by a warm and possibly dry summer which may alter the water availability in the soil. The uncompensated warm-dry summer with precipitation in other seasons will decrease the water availability in the soil and at some point, the soil may not have enough water to support the growth of the trees.

In the Mediterranean area, the effects of dry-warm summer will make the trees suffer even more, and some dry summers have even led to numbers of wildfire cases in the area. In the tropical area, the effects of climate change are even more complicated than in other areas. As climate change alters the precipitation patterns and increases the temperature, it will dry out the forest and cause a forest fire. Tropical forests are home to many tree species which makes them great carbon storage, and thus with fires happening, the big amount of carbon will be released to the atmosphere. They are also home to a complex intra- and inter-species interaction that creates a strong and stable forest resilience system, providing the idea that the species within the tropical forests can work together to overcome the changes in its environment. However, with the fire that may keep happening in a more intense and more frequent nature under climate change, the resilience system in tropical forests may break down. It will then be a difficult task for the forest to recover from a disturbance. Moreover, a case of frequent fire will cause the forest and the land to be more degraded, making them more prone to forest fires.

However, the forest ecosystem is more complex than that. A tree is an intelligent and complicated living being. Like humans, it can adapt to the changes and it’s socializing with the other trees in its neighborhood. There are some cases where some tree species take advantage of the abundant amount of carbon in the atmosphere or from the warm temperature. They also have their own survival mechanism; they move. Some species will shift their distribution pattern, and this has been a widely spread case in Europe. Some tree species move to the uphill of the mountainside because the temperature in the downhill is too warm already for them.

Some trees, like those who live in a tropical forest or in a mixed forest, can benefit from the mixture of species. There have been studies going on about trees helping other trees, and about how different characteristics of tree species can complement and support each other. We know that trees as individuals have their own characteristics and those characteristics are different from each other. By growing together in a mixture of species and age, one tree with one characteristic can help another tree that doesn’t have this characteristic. And it’s interesting. We don’t know yet how much one tree can support another, but we know that it’s happening.

We know that climate change in this decade is mostly driven by human activities, but there are still good things from our population too. Studies are conducted from the smallest scale to the largest scale. By the smallest scale I mean we try to look deep into trees’ genetic structure and try to understand how they work when they are exposed to the changes in climate. And by the largest scale I mean we try to see how the changes in climate affect the forest landscape as a whole, for example, we can analyze the pattern of fire spread, model the fire regime and predict future fire events from images sent by satellite.

We know that climate change does not only cause suffering for the human population, but it also gives a hard time for the trees. Surely, we are anxious that they won’t make it through this anxious moment, but there are still hopes that they can make it given that they can evolve, and that people are giving them hands to do that.