Understanding the interactions between forests and future climate change

Climate change will have different impacts on forests depending in part on the sizes of trees in those forests. A new study published in New Phytologist provides insights related to forest differences that could be used to build better climate models and understand the interactions between forests and future climate change. 

The study involved repeat tree censuses from 25 large-scale forest plots spanning a broad climatic range over five continents, and investigators examined how different aspects of forests’ carbon cycle vary with tree diameter and with average annual temperature and precipitation. 

“This study, made possible by decades of collaboration within the ForestGEO network, highlights the complexity of interactions between forest structure and climate, and shows that small trees are more important in forest productivity than previously thought,” said lead author Camille Piponiot, PhD, of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and the Université de Montpellier.