What can tree wood density teach us about changes in the environment? This is what a recent study published in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences hopes to address as a team of researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences investigated the adaptations of tree wood density with regards to changes in environmental conditions, including climate and soil. This study holds the potential to help researchers, climate scientists, and the public better understand the impacts of climate change on the environment and how we can predict these changes by improving global models.
For the study, the team examined tree wood density comprised of six plant functional types (PFTs) and 138,604 observations worldwide with the goal of improving current Earth system models, whose tree wood density data is the same across all PFTs. Additionally, the team wanted to determine how tree wood density responds to environmental changes, including climate and soil. In the end, the team found that climate contributes greater to tree wood density than soil, which was found for all PFTs. Additionally, once this new data was input into Earth system models, the researchers found they were able to predict tree wood density with extreme accuracy.
“Our results highlight the importance of considering spatial variability in wood density when modeling vegetation dynamics,” said Dr. Xiang Song, who is a scientist in the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and lead author of the study. “In future studies, we plan to integrate this spatial heterogeneity into DGVMs, which we expect will improve the simulation of forest characteristics, such as tree height and forest coverage, especially in central forest areas and transition zones.”
What new discoveries will researchers make regarding tree wood density and the environment in the coming years and decades? Only time will tell, and this is why we science!
As always, keep doing science & keep looking up!
Sources: Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, EurekAlert!
Featured Image Credit: Xiaodong Zeng