A trial developed for 12 years shows that woodlands are able to adapt to climate changes

Oct 22, 2011 10:00 GMT  ·  By
If more elevated levels of ozone were at first responsible for inhibiting tree growth, by the end of the trial it seems that the forest's productivity didn't suffer at all.
   If more elevated levels of ozone were at first responsible for inhibiting tree growth, by the end of the trial it seems that the forest's productivity didn't suffer at all.

Scientists reached the conclusion that they have underestimated the woodland's ability of fighting global warming.

Nowadays, politicians seem to correlate the creation of new jobs with a higher level of pollution.

This is bad news for environmental organizations, but it seems that they might have a reason to get excited as well, since scientists from University of Michigan have finally established that forests are able to filter a more significant amount of CO2 than previously expected.

This conclusion implies the fact that vegetation might be able to keep up with the constant developing of industrial processes which act as a major source of pollution.

In order to find out how woodlands will deal with the increasing levels of CO2 scientists studied trees for 12 years in a forest located in Wisconsin.

The main theory elaborated after this period led to the conclusion that nature is more powerful than we might have thought before.

"Some of the initial assumptions about ecosystem response are not correct and will have to be revised,” stated Donald Zak in his research that appeared this week in Ecology Letters.

From 1997 to 2008, Zak and his crew supplied the amount of CO2 absorbed by trees by pumping carbon dioxide in trees planted on the surface of a 38-acre experimental forest in Rhinelander, Wisconsin.

In turned out that this action had beneficial effects upon the forest. CO2-soaked trees grew 26 percent more than the rest of the trees. It seems that the carbon dioxide gave trees a boost, since it helped them grow small roots which allowed them to collect more efficiently nitrogen from soil.

"The greater growth has been sustained by an acceleration, rather than a slowing down, of soil nitrogen cycling. Under elevated carbon dioxide, the trees did a better job of getting nitrogen out of the soil, and there was more of it for plants to use,” affirmed Zak.

As part of the experiment, the research team also influenced the ozone treatments applied to some trees. If more elevated levels of ozone were at first responsible for inhibiting tree growth, by the end of the trial it seems that the forest's productivity didn't suffer at all.

"The interesting take home point with this is that aspects of biological diversity - like genetic diversity and plant species compositions - are important components of an ecosystem's response to climate change”, concluded Zak.