Escalating carbon dioxide emissions have boosted the growth rate of quaking aspens — one of North America's most important deciduous trees — by a whopping 50 percent over the past 50 years. Scientists have previously shown that CO2 enhances aspen growth in experiments, but a new study is the first to show that aspens are responding to the greenhouse gas in their native environment.
Christopher Cole of the University of Minnesota at Morris and colleagues measured the growth rates of 919 individual aspen in Wisconsin forests. The growth rate of aspen was variable throughout the past few decades, but overall it rose by 50 per cent between the 1960s and the present day. The team looked at whether genetic diversity or regional changes in precipitation and length of the growing season could have caused the trend. Comparing tree-ring data, a measure of annual growth, with records of atmospheric carbon dioxide, they found that a substantial amount of the increased growth was spurred by elevated CO2 concentrations.
The findings suggest that aspen forests will continue to be important sinks for carbon dioxide, at least in the short term. But rapid expansion of these pioneering trees could have untold ecological consequences, say the researchers.
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Newton, A. Aspen explosion. Nature Clim Change 1, 2–3 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/climate.2010.131
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/climate.2010.131
