From the “trees aren’t linear instruments and the Liebigs Law department” and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, comes this story that suggests the older trees are, the less linear their tree ring growth might be, which has implications for “paleoclimatology” and Mann’s hockey stick temperature reconstructions from tree rings.
Trees grow faster and store more carbon as they age
Trees put on weight faster and faster as they grow older, according to a new study in the journal Nature. The finding that most trees’ growth accelerates as they age suggests that large, old trees may play an unexpectedly dynamic role in removing carbon from the atmosphere.
Richard Condit, staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, devised the analysis to interpret measurements from more than 600,000 trees belonging to 403 species. “Rather than slowing down or ceasing growth and carbon uptake, as we previously assumed, most of the oldest trees in forests around the world actually grow faster, taking up more carbon,” Condit said. “A large tree may put on weight equivalent to an entire small tree in a year.”
“If human growth would accelerate at the same rate, we would weigh half a ton by middle age and well over a ton at retirement,” said Nate Stephenson, lead author and forest ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey.
Whether accelerated growth of individual trees translates into greater carbon storage by aging forests remains to be seen. Programs like the United Nations REDD+ are based on the idea that forest conservation and reforestation mitigate global warming by reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
In 1980, the first large-scale tree plot was established in Panama in an effort to understand why tropical forests were so diverse. More than 250,000 trees with trunk diameters greater than 1 centimeter were identified and measured within a 50-hectare area.
“ForestGEO is now the foremost forest observatory system in the world with 53 plots in 23 countries and more than 80 partner institutions,” said Stuart Davies, ForestGEO director. “We hope that researchers continue to work with our data and our staff as they ask new questions about how forests respond to global change.”
The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, headquartered in Panama City, Panama, is a unit of the Smithsonian Institution. The Institute furthers the understanding of tropical nature and its importance to human welfare, trains students to conduct research in the tropics and promotes conservation by increasing public awareness of the beauty and importance of tropical ecosystems.
Website:
http://www.stri.si.edu/english/research/features/forestgeo.php
“””””…..Streetcred says:
January 15, 2014 at 10:28 pm
So, how does this impact Professor Turkey’s required planting of Kauri trees to offset his carbon-footprint misadventure in Antarctica ?……””””””
Well I hope he doesn’t try planting them in Antarctica.
I believe there is this thing called the Moko Hinau line, south of which Kauri trees simply will not grow. They grow plenty good up north.
I have my favorite wide angle shot picture of Tane Mahuta, (the current largest Kauri) mounted in a frame made from 40,000 year old “Swamp Kauri” dug up from a long buried, and perfectly preserved ancient forest, that all got inundated in some ancient maelstrom or something. I was holding out for a 50,000 year old frame, but they were out of those at the time.
There is so much swamp kauri being dug up that they no longer need to, (or allow) cut a live tree.
Mike Jonas says:
January 15, 2014 at 9:33 pm
phlogiston – re “in temperate forest [..] there is more carbon deposition in soil” : interesting. Links?
Here is a link to Malhi et al 1999, it looks like a good source of data for forest carbon fluxes, haven’t had time to read it all yet.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1046/j.1365-3040.1999.00453.x/pdf
It appears to contradict my statement that temperate forest deposits more carbon. Instead it seems that everything is greater in tropical forest – plant biomass, soil carbon, and, surprisingly, carbon cycling is slower, not faster, in the tropics, contrary to what I remember from University ecology lectures. Maybe I’m missing something – anyway have a look and see what you think.
Anthony am I missing something. But this seems entirely consistent with tree ring analysis.
It is tree ring width they measure – right? Surely, one would expect if this where a function of climate and climate remained constant during the lifetime of the tree, then the tree rings would have constant thickness. It therefore follows that, given the increasing circumference as the tree ages, that the tree would indeed put on mass in a non-linear fashion. This would need to happen would it not if tree rings were to be used as climate proxies.
REPLY: Yes but realize that.
1. Multiple series are used in the hockey stick
2. No tree rings after 1962 because they weren’t cooperating
3. The additional non-linearity means some series ending might very well be off
4. Increased uncertainty to an already uncertain business of assuming temperature was the only driver of growth.
-Anthony
A tree may gain mass more rapidly, but it grows taller and wider. Does that have an effect on the thickness of tree rings? Do the tree rings also get thicker as the tree ages?
Pamela Gray says:
January 15, 2014 at 8:29 pm
I’ve seen old growth, second growth, and tree plantation stumps and blocks. The initial rings are big but then get smaller fairly quickly. After that it varies. I have spent years of my life tramping through federal and state forests as well as private stands. Natural re-growth will show clusters of closely packed young-uns. Human re-planting will show evenly spaced closely packed young-uns. But then again I am more than 1/2 a century old so who knows what the practices are these days. Anybody who is using trees as temperature thermometers better know the history of re-planting patterns and practices, both natural and man-made, if they don’t want to be laughed off the page by this little forest elf. And that ain’t from book learnin. It’s from my own two eyes.
***********
OK, I guess in my 30+ years of forestry experience I didn’t learn anything. Just wanted to understand Forestry Professor Gray.
Oh dear.
Trees grow at the bark level, adding a layer each year.
In order for the tree to add a constant width ring to an existing bole, it has to add more and more material each year, proportional to its age, and its height.
So there is nothing controversial about this. Its bleedin’ obvious.
Neither does it really have any impact on temperature versus ring width either. May things can accelerate or decelerate annual growth, including lack of water or not, general cloudiness or not, and late winters or early falls.
Using trees as proxies for global temperatures was always dubious., This makes it neither less so not more so.
Finally, the rate of conversion of CO2 to solid material is, all other things being equal, driven by insolation and the actual coverage of land area with vegetation. Big trees my do more, but they do so at the expense of smaller trees which do not flourish in their shade.
I can see that vividly here, where plantations, planted for pit props around WWI now feature masses of dead small tress, that have been simply crowded out of the space by the few trees that grew fastest.
Whereas 200 meters away,. large free standing oaks at least 300 years old have massive crowns and boles and occupy the space of 10 or more smaller trees.
Juice says:
January 16, 2014 at 5:21 am
A tree may gain mass more rapidly, but it grows taller and wider. Does that have an effect on the thickness of tree rings? Do the tree rings also get thicker as the tree ages?
^^^^^^^
It’s not an “either-or” situation. In general, unless a new forest stand gets started under overly dense conditions, trees in a young developing stand will have wider rings than older trees. But, each individual tree isn’t adding much volume, because the annual growth is being added to small diameter. As the tree grows, its overall diameter increases, such than even a smaller annual increment adds a much larger volume increment.
However, trees in properly managed stands can maintain excellent diameter growth (wide rings) for a longer period. Eventually annual diameter increment slows, but volume increment continues to rise.
‘settled science’. We are still being suprised by the wildly moving target of TREES, yet some think they have our global climate nailed down.
I lean toward young earth. I know, I know – I’m an idiot, moron, brainless danger to society. But the same kind of ‘elite scientists’ have declared the same ‘settled science’ in Darwinism. New findings like soft tissue in fossils, complexity of DNA, and speed of light may not be constant are automatically crammed into the established ‘truth’ no matter the cost. Just like ‘climate change’, there is no interest in being wrong on major assumptions so they cram and tamper. Oh and slander the other side (you flat-earthers).
How can there be so much agenda and politics in Science? (see Expelled). It makes me doubt the establishment on all fronts, don’t trust anyone over 40 :>)
Piltdown Mann is not a scientist but an activist out to get public tax $ to fund his Uni and his own ego. Tree ring circuses are not ‘climate indicators’ but one manifestation amongst a million variables of a complex convection system, about which the human knows very very little. Mann should be in jail for fraud. Piled on High and Deep Phd quack…..
This is news? The Smithsonian continues its steady decline. First, the trees aren’t necessarily growing “faster”. They are large trees getting larger. In terms of rate of growth, a sapling may increase its size a few hundred percent in a year. Meanwhile the large tree may only increase a few percent on size, but because it is so big, that few percent is equal to many saplings. It took them years of study to figure that out, only to describe it inaccurately?
Anthony
Thanks for the reply. I probably agree with all you say. I’m not a tree expert but common sense would tell you that tree growth is a function of water supply, amount of sunshine, soil conditions as well as temperature. One only need plant two trees (same type) in different parts of a garden to see how even microgeography effects growth.
[trimmed]
Drat, messed up formatting. Here it is, correctly formatted:
To Eustace Cranch:
You wrote:
First, as someone pointed out up-thread, the tree’s height is limited by the power
of capillary action to raise the water it needs from its roots to its crown. However,
the mature tree will continue to put on weight, which is what the original article
was talking about.
As to trees growing forever, you’re guilty of thinking statically. A forest is a
dynamic environment, where things like beavers, insect infestations, diseases,
windstorms, drought, and a horde of other factors can change. What happens
is that the trees will grow until they are impacted by something. Over time, the
chance of something showing up which will kill the tree increases until it becomes
a certainty.
A tree can even kill itself, by having a large root grow completely around the
trunk, which “girdles” and kills the tree. I have seen this happen with older
hardwoods.
Mod, perchance you could remove the incorrectly-formatted first post?
And this is a NEW scientific discovery?? Boy, every home gardener sees this exponential growth happen in everything in the garden; annuals, perennials, trees.
In the article they make it clear that the STAND of trees (area basis) does NOT keep growing faster with age, by reaches an equilibrium after a certain point, particularly by death of trees crowded out by these big trees that they studied.
Also, the WEIGHT of the tree that keeps getting larger with age is not the same as the RING WIDTH getting wider. As adult trees get larger, the area of new trunk added stays approximately constant, but is spread over a larger diameter each year, and thus ring width goes down each year (on average) but since the tree gets taller and has a bigger crown each year (for the dominant trees in this study) there is more mass added each year over this entire volume of trunk and branches and roots. So nothing about Mann is disproven (can’t believe I am defending dendros here–there are plenty of other problems with tree ring analysis).
Two things: Craig Loehle, don’t worry, you aren’t defending Mann or his work or the work of his colleagues, you are only defending underlying science. Sleep tight!
Secondly: I wonder what the results would have been if CO2 were still around 310 ppm? Considerably less growth and CO2 uptake, I would assume, than at nearly 400 ppm.
And the width of a tree ring varies as the square of the tree diameter. It is not a linear reflection of added mass.
Ladies and Gentlemen.
I think most of you including Anthony watts miss the most important point, ignoring the laps-rate,
hiding the decline…..
…….. of the average heighth and diameter of the quite general tree in the quite general hill-slope all over the USA and in the rest of the world.
Which rather may have been what Michael E.Mann has been studying and telling about.
Thus it comes maybe, if you happen to be of the flat earth- believers.
But I have been told that there are also “Hillbillies” over there.
ThebHillbillies do not live here, but on this side of the atlantic we have Ole Øvreby, Ole Midtby and Ole Nedreby. or Ole. Upigard, Ole. Midgard and Ole. Nedregard, all of them very trustful peasants, experienced loggers, and woodchoppers.
Ole or Per or Pål Upigarden does plant his potatoes 4 weeks later than O or P.or P Medregard or nedrebø, and harvest them 4 weeks earlier also.
I tend to have seen that Mr. Mann has been studying Rocky Mountains- trees, not quite arbitrary and artificially planted foreighn trees from anywhere, where the earth is flat.
They surely have similar situations also in Germany, where the landscape may be “Alpine” because there they say: “Entweder über Unterammergau oder über Oberammergau oder überhaupt nicht über Unterammergau oder über Oberammergau.
Just in order to make people aware of theese things
Ober oder Unterammergau makes quite a difference you see, and there they even have Allgau for reference..
This follows from the extreemly fameous and well known fact that the so called “clima- zones”, that you have to drive several thousand kilometers by car on the flat earth to seek up and to find, do follow in just a few hundred meters or steps uphill, or downhill, provided that the earth is not flat, so that you are able to conscider this.
Antony Watts may be able to tell you why this is so.
If you are aquainted to Gardening, you also rather ought to have learnt about the same. Of where you ought to invest in apples or pears and outdoor tomatoes and sunflowers and even Vitis vinifera,…, and where you rather ought to set on Ribes and tougher roses and set on what belongs in the landscape from local and wild vegetation instead.
Also in Switzerland they have a Lapse- rate and a system of this. They also have Upigarden, Midtharden and Nedregarden, which is a very fameous, traditional and obvious situation wherever the earth is not flat.
It can indeed also be studied by rather conventional archaeological methods and means in regard to what has happened for the last 1000 years. on Øvrebø, Medbø and on Nedrebø, by looking at the local tree- rings that have grown on those local places during that span of time and on an average for the same well chosen indicator species.
I cannot see that you discuss this very obvious situation at all.
But I am able to see rather clearly here in my landescape whether I have my firewood from uphill or from downhill. And see also quite clearly that local and wild species from the tempered European forests have mooved uphill and north- eastward into the Taiga during my lifetime, along with that very fameous exponential curve , the Arrhenius- curve of global warming for maybe the last 150 years. That is superposed by other effects that are also rather well known and studied in our time.
[Reply: Moderators don’t get paid to try and figure out what this means. Does it mean too much schnapps? ~ mod.]
The Smithsonian scientists don’t appear to be measuring ring widths directly. They are measuring carbon growth in the select forests. Their data comes from two source: as LKMiller (aka treegyn1) notes above, the on-the-ground “confirming” measures of select plots of trees, from which they take diameters at breast height (dbh) and multiply it by estimates of height; but the primary data-gathering is conducted via flyovers in a laser-scanning airplane. (See Greg Asner’s “Ted Talk” for an overview – it’s actually pretty cool science http://www.ted.com/talks/greg_asner_ecology_from_the_air.html ) Asner narrates how scientists record chemical action in the canopy leaves, as recorded in the infrared spectrum, and decode this in a broad spectrum of colors to show different species.
The flyover Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data is amazing for its 3D clarity, and (apparently) shows that like species of trees within a single microclimate yield a characteristic color, determined by their leaf chemistry. Perhaps Craig or LKMiller would comment. It appears to me that trees of the same species, regardless of size or age all seem to grow at the same rate, based on the chemistry of their leaves. (See the Asner TED talk at about 3:00). This would suggest something dependable about ring widths, even if trees are in the understory – even if they are water- or nutrient-deprived. If those deprivations are widespread, they would be reflected commensurately in all members of the same species. If they do grow at the same rate, then a ring chronology developed from one fig would parallel the growth of all the other figs growing in the same microclimate at the same time. One Brazil Nut in the same area wants to propagate at roughly the same rate as all the others, etc. Given enough rings in the curve, they would represent the “reality” of their environment.
I’ve never made sweeping claims for what ring widths demonstrate – only that they appear to reflect the common fate of trees within a particular microclimate.