Climate Change Is Causing Trees To Struggle To “Breathe”

Recent research led by Penn State indicates that trees in warmer, drier environments struggle to absorb carbon dioxide, compromising their ability to counteract climate change. The study highlights an increase in photorespiration—a process where stressed trees release CO2—under these conditions, challenging the efficacy of trees as natural carbon sinks in a warming world. Credit: SciTechDaily.com

The results complicate a widespread belief about the role of plants in helping to draw down, or use, carbon from the atmosphere, providing new insight into how plants could adapt to climate change. Importantly, the researchers noted that as the climate warms, their findings demonstrate that plants could be less able to draw CO2 out of the atmosphere and assimilate the carbon necessary to help the planet cool down.

“When we think about climate futures, we predict that CO2 will go up, which in theory is good for plants because those are the molecules they breathe in,” Lloyd said. “But we’ve shown there will be a tradeoff that some prevailing models don’t account for. The world will be getting warmer, which means plants will be less able to draw down that CO2.”

“The database was originally used to train foresters how to identify trees from different places around the world, so we repurposed it to essentially reconstruct these forests to see how well they were taking in CO2,” Lloyd said. The team will now work to unearth photorespiration rates in the ancient past, up to tens of millions of years ago, using fossilized wood. The methods will allow researchers to explicitly test existing hypotheses regarding the changing influence of plant photorespiration on climate over geologic time.

Source: Energy Industry News (energyindustrynews.net)

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