From Duke University and the “I was sure those tree rings were linear indicators” department, comes this news: Climate Change May Speed Up Forests’ Life Cycles
DURHAM, N.C. – Many climate studies have predicted that tree species will respond to global warming by migrating via seed dispersal to cooler climates. But a new study of 65 different species in 31 eastern states finds evidence of a different, unexpected response.
Nearly 80 percent of the species aren’t yet shifting their geographic distributions to higher latitudes. Instead, they’re staying in place – but speeding up their life cycles.
The Duke University-led study, published online Wednesday in the peer-reviewed journal Global Change Biology, is the first to show that a changing climate may have dual impacts on forests. It adds to a growing body of evidence, including a 2011 study by the same Duke team, that climate-driven migration is occurring much more slowly than predicted, and most plant species may not be able to migrate fast enough to stay one step ahead of rising temperatures.
“Our analysis reveals no consistent, large-scale northward migration is taking place. Instead, most trees are responding through faster turnover – meaning they are staying in place but speeding up their life cycles in response to longer growing seasons and higher temperatures,” said James S. Clark, H.L. Blomquist Professor of Environment at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment.
Anticipating the impacts of this unexpected change on U.S. forests is an important issue for forest managers and for the nation as a whole, Clark said. It will have far-reaching consequences for biodiversity and carbon storage.
To test whether trees are migrating northward, having faster turnover, or both, the scientists went through decades of data on 65 dominant tree species in the 31 eastern states, compiled by the USDA Forest Service’s Forest Inventory and Analysis program. They used computer models to analyze the temperature and precipitation requirements of the trees at different life stages, and also considered factors like reproductive dependence of young and adult trees.
“The patterns we were able to see from this massive study are consistent with forests having faster turnover, where young trees tend to be more abundant than adult trees in warm, wet climates. This pattern is what we would expect to see if populations speed up their life cycle in warming climates,” said lead author Kai Zhu, a doctoral student of Clark’s at Duke. “This is a first sign of climate change impacts, before we see large-scale migrations. It gives a very different picture of how trees are responding to climate change.”
The fact that most trees are not yet showing signs of migration “should increase awareness that there is a significant lag time in how tree species are responding to the changing climate,” Zhu said.
The study was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), and Zhu was supported by an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant.
Christopher W. Woodall, research forester at the U.S. Forest Service’s Northern Research Station in St. Paul, Minn., Souparno Ghosh, a postdoctoral researcher in Duke’s Department of Statistical Science, and Alan E. Gelfand, J.B. Duke Professor of Statistics and Decision Sciences in Duke’s Department of Statistical Science, were co-authors of the study. Clark also holds an appointment as professor in the Department of Statistical Science.
Paper:
“Dual Impacts of Climate Change: Forest Migration and Turnover through Life History”
Kai Zhu, Christopher W. Woodall, Souparno Ghosh, Alan E. Gelfand, James S. Clark
Published Sept. 11, 2013, in Global Change Biology
DOI: 10.1111/gcb.12382
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.12382/abstract
“This is a first sign of climate change impacts, before we see large-scale migrations.”
Or your theories are wrong and we won’t see a large scale migration. Shouldn’t you pay attention to what your own data is telling you rather than speculate on an unproven theory?
It’s almost as if life evolved amidst fluctuating temperatures and readily adjusts as necessary.
@John West – I guess that is why homo sapiens have the ability to sweat.
MattN at 3.48am
– looked up Greengrok as I had never heard of the site until you mentioned it.
Dean Chimeides seems to be an alarmist voice crying in the wilderness. His last ten, lengthy, posts generated no less than two comments in total. Presumably Duke feels that he is spending their money wisely but I wonder if U.S. taxpayers do.
“Species cannot migrate fast enough to stay ahead of temperature changes”
Or.
Changes are not happening as fast as they were predicted to by models, so that shows that species are migrating at the rate which suits reality, rather than modelled theory.
I guess that nobody bothered to show the output from climate models to the trees!
@David Chappell
„… comprehensible English …”
I. What does that mean in science?
II. It is not our fault that the English – as the language of science – has so many drawbacks …
NeilC and Jimbo said that which is the most important …
They have to be extremely powerful interferences of external factors in climate to there has been a migration.
I “will fill” excellent comment Jimbo.
PETM.
Carozza (2011, coauthor Gavin A. Schmidt! http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2011/2010GL046038.shtml): “For a global average warming of 3°C, a release of CO2 to the ocean and CH4 to the atmosphere totalling 900 to 1400 Pg C …” “To explain the observations, the carbon must have been released over at most 500 years.” “Durations of 50 and 250 years are data‐compatible …; however, only a duration of 50 years is compatible with 3°C of warming [!].”
So extremely rapid and a huge change! Very strong impact.
Previous paper by Jaramillo (2010, – 28 coauthors!, http://www.sciencemag.org/content/330/6006/957.abstract).
“We observed a rapid and distinct increase in plant diversity and origination rates, with a set of new taxa …”
“The tropical rainforest was able to persist under elevated temperatures and high levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, in contrast to SPECULATIONS that tropical ecosystems were severely compromised by heat stress.”
Even PETM was “too little” to bring about unidirectional migration – depletion of the most important ecosystems …
………. said lead author Kai Zhu, a doctoral student of Clark’s at Duke. “This is a first sign of climate change impacts, before we see large-scale migrations.”
HA, the only large-scale migrations those jokers will ever see will be by ducks, geese, caribou, wildebeest, illegal immigrants, etc.
But the grandchildren of those researchers will never live long enough to see large-scale migrations of trees.
That is, as long as no one “forces” said migration by transporting seeds and/or seedlings like 30 miles farther northward each year for the next 10 to 15 years, ….. weather (climate) permitting.
The ranting and delusional denialist,
I like the idea of trees “migrating”. So Birnam Wood does come to Dunsinane.
So when we skeptics have been claiming, against a barage of critisism and ridicule, that increased CO2 would be good for trees and help them grow faster and bigger, that we were right all along?
All this study does is prove that the effect of the real changes in climate, (which are stable temperatures for the last 2 decades), aligned with a continuous increase in CO2, leads to faster tree growth.
In other words, CO2 is NOT driving temperatures and CO2 IS plant food after all, as we all knew from science 101 in school
That is precisley what this study shows.
i actually have been there on a class trip
To expand on Bob Greene’s comment about landuse – forest dynamics, influence of past harvesting, insects and pathogens, exclusion of fire, etc must be controlled for to reach any reasonable conclusion. It is not clear if that has been done here.
The forest harvesting history on these sites really needs to be considered. Until the last couple decades, typical harvesting was implemented as “thinning from above”. This basically meant a highgrade where the best trees were taken and the worst were left. This is often implemented as a diameter limit cut where all trees over a specified diameter were cut leaving the little ones. Further, the return harvesting cycle on the same site was often faster than the rate of regrowth, putting further downward pressure on average size. The legacy of this practice would tend to create more small trees as they filled in the space made by taking out the bigger ones. Forest health issues can have the same effect with American chestnut, Elm, and other species having been nearly eliminated, other smaller trees have taken there place.
Finally, I have a hard time understanding how they did this for individual species when we know species grow together and influence each other. Some species grow faster than others and tend to dominate, forcing subordinates into the mid-canopy and understory where they receive less light and tend to stay smaller. As the original dominating tree gets old and dies the subordinate grows quickly to fill in the space. This natural succession is a very long term process and it is reasonable to assume there is still some influence of colonial land clearing and ship mast harvesting on the successional status.
I could go on and talk about exclusion of forest fires and so on but it seems to me they set out hoping to find species migration, and then tried to salvage something for the poor fellows PhD without giving it enough thought. There are so many other factors to explain these changes that to single out a minute change in climate seems dishonest. If it wasn’t paywalled perhaps I could give it a more fair reading.
The “pause” has been a lot longer than 17 years. The previous 80 years of “warming” is all due to data manipulation, “adjusting” and “homogenizing” older data so that it looks colder than it really was. “Scientists” have created a mess for themselves. By tampering with temperature data, and then trying to relate observations to this bad data, they’ve precluded any real science or conclusions.
So (assuing for the sake of arguent that climate change is happening at a greater rate than it always hats), trees are staying put and adapting quite nicely thank you, rather than running for the hills in panic.
Gosh, Nature is just full of surprises isn’t she?
From Samuel C Cogar on September 12, 2013 at 5:05 am:
As one who has been amazed at how many maple tree “helicopter” seed-things can accumulate in assorted vehicle nooks and crannies, I am certain maple tree seeds have been regularly transported 30 miles further northward for at least the past hundred years, most likely far longer. Likewise acorns and pine cones, which fall into truck and wagon beds. Don’t forget fruit trees, with discarded apple and pear cores, peach pits, etc.
If it was favorable to grow those trees up north, they would be growing there already.
Which makes me think these tree migrations haven’t started simply because they can’t survive where they’re supposed to be going, thus they haven’t left.
Self-congratulatory, “… this massive study …”
‘Before,’ a looooong time before – as in ages, eras, and epochs –
Yes, Duke, before we see climate-induced migration, we see larger portions of healthy juveniles in 80% of studied species, given warmer environment and improved nutrition. Welcome news.
My question, w/o reading the paper: does the study address age-distribution changes due to harvesting mature trees for homes, furniture, toys, and such?
….
Anthony, Thank you for a humorous start to my day.
– John Moore
” Zhu was supported by an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant.” My goodness, in my day you had to improve your own dissertation without a grant and maybe have been shown the door if it needed too much improvement.
This is unbelievable dreck. We’ve had 18 years of warming followed by 17 years of no warming to cooling. The trees live to be hundreds of years old. How can you have expected measurable migration. The pine cones drop a few metres away from the trunk. It would only be the northern fringe trees that would indicate any migration northwards with some sign of decline on the southern fringe. Did they note that the southern fringe is all old trees and the young aren’t developing too well and the northern fringe is overwhelmed with young trees and the older ones are standing pat?
Ya know, I think the growing scientific illiteracy of students going into these programs is a serious problem. They are going to have to establish a chair in logic in science to give a guiding hand to these PhD candidates and their scientifically illiterate professors (at Duke, I nominate rgb@duke for the job). Even the NSF feels the need for dissertation improvement (or maybe it is like the cultural revolution in China where “wrong thinking” citizens needed their thinking reworked) I haven’t read the paper but I’m sure they didn’t do the test I suggest should have been done (heck, I’m only an engineer/geologist).
the reason the trees are not migrating in the study area is because there has been no significant warming in the eastern US for 100 years. global warming is not global.
AndyG55 says:
September 12, 2013 at 1:23 am
Um.. maybe plants aren’t migrating, because the climate isn’t actually changing!…..
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
My first thoughts exactly.
I guess this ‘Biologists’ never heard of the Köppen climate classification system.
This MAP of movement of the Köppen climatic boundaries in the midwest shows why these ‘Biologists’ is having such a tough time in seeing movements in the eastern states. The 1900, 1930 and 1950 decadal boundries were further north than the boundaries for the 1990 decade which is sitting pretty much in the center for the 20th century.
This is verified independently by this chart from Jo Nova showing how GISS (Hansen) ‘ADJUSTED’ the temperature data to hide what the plants are telling us. Comparison of 1980, 1987 and 2007 Global Surface Temperature Graphs
Of course to keep up Hansen’s and the IPCC’s fictional representation of the earth’s climate, trees have to take the rap for not showing what isn’t there. To question the gospel of the Church of CAGW of course would be unthinkable.
Credibility of scientists takes another nosedive.
(Mod.s Since I can not show these graphs in comments, it would really be nice to put these two maps right under the article for all to see. One is from Jo Nova and the other of Köppen climatic boundaries, from the Pompous Git.)
The ambiguity is also most annoying. Is it a good or bad thing for the older trees to be growing faster. If migration is a problem, then get out the weed wackers and let’s mitigate one time right now. If slowness is a problem let’s load up the cones and head north and cut the south for firewood. Oh they are already doing that – shipping southern wood to UK to burn to prevent climate change! We need a vaccine for this craziness.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22630815
“they are staying in place but speeding up their life cycles”
Ah, I understand the author’s confusion. What they are talking about aren’t trees at all. What they have been researching are Ents. They look like trees but are able to move from place to place. Trees on the other hand always stay in place except maybe in Disney cartoons. An understandable mistake.
“Nearly 80 percent of the species aren’t yet shifting their geographic distributions to higher latitudes. Instead, they’re staying in place – but speeding up their life cycles.”
Kinda makes you wonder about their fundamental assumption that trees at the tree line respond primarily to temperature over other factors.
Perhaps the trees are waiting to see if it’s a temporary cyclical anomaly or something real. In which case, that would be empirical evidence that warmists aren’t as smart as wood.
This paper demonstrates nothing. They used a model of tree growth driven by data obtained from the US department of Forestry and temperature data. There was no attempt to compare the model to what is actually happening in the forests these trees appear in. No feet touched the soil of a forest among the authors. The conclusions are unsupportable. A crap paper hidden behind a paywall. I think I am just going to stop paying taxes. And if the government asks me why I will tell them I don’t give money to thiefs. Do the tree huggers even hug trees anymore???? Apparently not. So much for caring about the forests. So what are they hugging these days? Computers with pretty wallpaper of photoshopped trees. Idiots.
What is also left out of this study is that most of the US forests on the East Coast were cut down and have only recently been reforested thanks to coal, modern agricultural techniques and modern transportation.
Just walk through a North East ‘Forest’ and see how many stone walls you find.
Also as with other crops trees that are planted by man are subject to man’s tinkering with breeding programs and importation.
Don’t universities teach ANYTHING useful these days?
Unfortunately we are spending enormous taxpayers dollars to fund this nonsense the results of which are obvious even to the average person with common sense. The country needs to put these folks to useful work that will add the economy instead of being a drain on the economy .
Of course the administration has mastered the tactic of spreading your dollars to buy support from the masses. It is no different than garnering support by expanding food stamps and giving Obama cell phones
I think the author watched “The Two Towers” too many times. The papers lead in evokes the image of trees physically moving. New Road sign “Warning, Tree Crossing”. Plus I think they confuse the natural expansion of the range of species when conditions are favorable vs a forced loss of range due to unfavorable conditions. I see nowhere do they document any loss of range solely due to changed climate conditions.
As for the speeding up of growth, perhaps trees have actually been surviving on marginal conditions and the increase in CO2 is actually providing them with more fuel to grow to their potential. Similar to children that have been on a substandard diet and finally begin to receive more of the nutrition their body can use.