Forests are one of the most important ways our planet regulates its climate. It's simple: Trees remove carbon from the atmosphere and store it. Older forests tend to store more carbon than younger ones, and a single big tree can add the same amount of carbon to the forest within a year as is contained in an entire midsized tree. Understanding the world's forest systems is an essential factor in building a picture of our planet's health. Forest ecologists can do this by walking through the forests they study and gathering data on each and every tree. One of those forest-walkers is Kristina Anderson-Teixeira, leader of the Ecosystems and Climate Initiative for Smithsonian's Forest Global Earth Observatory (ForestGEO), which monitors more than 6 million trees around the world.
ForestGEO started out as a grassroots coalition of scientists who were curious about forest health. Today, it's the only network of research forests that has standardized these protocols across all the different types of forests on a global scale. "This puts us in a unique position to do comparisons. We're looking at larger plots and smaller tree sizes than is typical of most forest plots. It's really very powerful in terms of data and the types of questions we can ask," Anderson-Teixeira says.
One of the biggest and most pervasive consequences of climate change worldwide is drought. As the climate warms and the amount of precipitation doesn't change, drought is more likely. These droughts don't happen everywhere, but where they do occur, they can be much more severe than in the past. What ForestGEO has helped discover is that it's the bigger, older trees - the ones that hold the most carbon - that have a tendency to suffer more when their local ecosystem dries up.
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