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Publication Date
5 April 2022

Global field observations of tree die-off reveal hotter-drought fingerprint for Earth’s forests

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Author

Earth’s forests face grave challenges in the Anthropocene, including hotter droughts increasingly associated with widespread forest die-off events. But despite the vital importance of forests to global ecosystem services, their fates in a warming world remain highly uncertain. Lacking is quantitative determination of commonality in climate anomalies associated with pulses of tree mortality—from published, field-documented mortality events—required for understanding the role of extreme climate events in overall global tree die-off patterns. Here we established a geo-referenced global database documenting climate-induced mortality events spanning all tree-supporting biomes and continents, from 154 peer-reviewed studies since 1970. Our analysis quantifies a global “hotter-drought fingerprint” from these tree-mortality sites—effectively a hotter and drier climate signal for tree mortality—across 675 locations encompassing 1,303 plots. Frequency of these observed mortality-year climate conditions strongly increases nonlinearly under projected warming. Our database also provides initial footing for further community-developed, quantitative, ground-based monitoring of global tree mortality.

Hammond, William M., A. Park Williams, John T. Abatzoglou, Henry D. Adams, Tamir Klein, Rosana López, Cuauhtémoc Sáenz-Romero, Henrik Hartmann, David D. Breshears, and Craig D. Allen. 2022. “Global Field Observations Of Tree Die-Off Reveal Hotter-Drought Fingerprint For Earth’s Forests”. Nature Communications 13. doi:10.1038/s41467-022-29289-2.
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