Page 2 - Tree Mortality News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Elevated tree mortality and reduced recruitment of new trees linked to drought and fires has been reported across a range of forests over the last few decades. Forests that resprout new foliage epicormically from buds beneath the bark are considered highly resilient to disturbance, but are potentially at risk of elevated mortality, demographic shifts and changes to species composition due to synergistic effects of drought and fire. Despite this, the effects of drought-fire interactions on such forests remain largely unknown. We assessed the effects of drought severity and fire frequency on juv...

Aim: To estimate loss of above-ground carbon (AGC) and conversion of live carbon to dead carbon following understorey and canopy fire. Location: South-eastern Australia. Time period: 2019–2020. Major taxa studied: Four widespread resprouting eucalypt forests. Methods: Above-ground carbon was measured in 15 plots in each of four forest types one-year post-fire. We also assessed topkill, that is, trees subject to canopy loss that failed to resprout epicormically. Results: While canopy fire was associated with greater declines in AGC than understorey fire, this was only statistically significan...

Increases in tree mortality linked to drought and fires have been reported across a range of forests globally over the last few decades. Forests that resprout epicormically/aerially should be the most resistant and resilient to changes in fire regime, yet they may be at risk of increased mortality, demographic shifts and changes to species composition due to the compounding effects of drought and fire. Despite this, the synergistic effects of drought and fire frequency on resprouters has received less attention than for obligate seeder tree species. Our study examined the effects of drought se...

Whispers from the Ghosting Trees A guest post by Gail Zawacki, who blogs at Wit's End.

Understand how trees die is difficult, but critical for climate research