Earth Equity News

Study: How Tall Trees Could Fare in Climate Change. By Guy Kovner, PressDemocrat.com, August 3, 2010. "The redwoods 'hold a record of everything they have experienced in their lifetime,' said Ruskin Hartley, executive director of Save the Redwoods League… He was introducing the Redwoods and Climate Change Initiative, a three-year, $2.5 million project aimed at assessing how coast redwoods, the world's tallest trees, and the inland Giant sequoia, the most massive tree species, are likely to fare against rising global temperatures... Small probes attached to tree trunks measure how fast water is moving through the sapwood, the live portion of the tree just under the bark. Scientists then can quantify how much water the redwood consumes and how much carbon fixation it is achieving through photosynthesis… Already, the project has yielded some surprises. The rate of wood growth in the Humboldt Redwoods park's ancient trees has doubled in the past century, Sillett said. That disproved the old notion that redwoods grow more slowly as they age. But it isn't clear what it means or what conditions prompted the growth, he said."