Trees are losing leaves due to climate change



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Trees are losing leaves due to climate change

Each year, in a process known as sensation, the leaves of deciduous trees turn yellow, orange and red as they stop growing and before they fall off the tree before winter, the plant’s nutrients are absorbed. Leaf detection also marks the end of the period during which plants absorb carbon dioxide by modifying light.

Global warming translates into longer growing seasons – spring leaves appear on European trees about two weeks earlier than 100 years ago, the researchers said.

“Previous models have speculated that as autumn gets warmer in the next century, autumn will be delayed – growing seasons will be longer overall and autumn will be delayed by two to three weeks,” said one ecologist. . Constantine Johner said.

However, Johner and A team of researchers says their results contradict this prediction.

“We actually predict that by the end of the century the leaves could fall three to six days earlier,” said Johner, author of an article published in the magazine on Friday. Science, addition.

Using a combination of field inspections, laboratory testing and modeling, experts over the past six decades have developed six European autumn tree species: European Horse Trees, Silver Brush, European Beech, European Lark, English Oak, and English Rock. Done.

Experts have found that increased spring and summer productivity resulting from elevated levels of carbon dioxide, temperature and light causes trees to shed their leaves earlier, the experts found.

Falling temperatures and day length were assumed to be the main environmental factors that led to tree leaf shedding, Johner said. Now, the researchers have identified a third factor: “self-sustaining” productivity.

“What we are seeing now is the third major ongoing process: (tree) productivity is adjusting itself. If you are already running in the spring and summer, if the plant absorbs more CO2 in synthesis. “Spring and summer, first they lose their leaves,” he said.

“It’s a pattern that we also see in humans: if you start eating first, you’ll finish first,” he said.

“Research has shown that trees have low productivity,” Zohner said.

“We can’t put maximum CO2 in the atmosphere and (hopefully) trees will do a lot more – there are limits.”

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