Global warming has prevented forests recover from fires
Global warming has significantly reduced the rate of recovery of forests after fires in the early XXI century compared with the end of the twentieth century, in particular, the number of sites where the forest could not recover, has grown by half.
12фотографий12фотографий12фотографий
To this effect the increase of temperature and decrease of humidity after the fire, researchers-ecologists in Ecology Letters.
As a result of global warming on Earth in recent years has increased the average number of fires.
Usually after a fire, a period of low temperature and high humidity, which allows the forest to recover quickly enough. However, due to global warming, sometimes even after the fire the temperature drops. While exactly how the forest ecosystem will respond to a fire, and how quickly the forests will recover from it under conditions of increasing temperature, until now, was not clear. Since it is more sensitive to dry conditions, the trees in the early stages of growth (seedlings and young shoots), the effects of global warming on these processes can be significant.
To assess this effect quantitatively, an American climate scientists, under the leadership of Camille Stephens Roman (Camille Stevens-Rumann) from the University of Idaho compared the rate of recovery of forests after fires in the late XX century and early XXI century. To do this, they studied forest recovery in a thousand different points in the Rocky mountains after the 52 fires that have occurred there from 1988 to 2011. Throughout this period, scientists were divided into two intervals: up to 2000 and beyond. Separately ecologists studied the dry coniferous forest (to get rid of the needles in dry periods) and wet coniferous forests.