By Susan Milius
Those trees falling in the forest with no one listening — in the changing climate of the West, they’re falling about twice as fast as they were 50 years ago, says a new study.
These background, or noncatastrophic, mortalities aren’t the result of wildfires or the huge outbreaks of pine beetles. The recent increase in temperature is likely to blame, the researchers suggest.
Records from 76 plots of apparently healthy, old-growth temperate forest in the western United States and Canada show that the small number of routine, noncatastrophic tree deaths in a year has doubled since 1955, reports a team of researchers from eight institutions.