Forests and climate change: pine trees dying in France | Hacker News Reader

Forests and climate change: pine trees dying in France

lemonde.fr

84 pointszoobab40 comments

Quick translation: Because of heat waves and droughts, the coniferous forests of France are drying out and dying.

A few interesting points:

- Plants with a short lifecycle migrate pretty quickly with climate change, (so, plants that like heat are moving further north). Trees, because they have a long life cycle, don't move at the same pace, so more are dying.

- There's a government project called "Project Giono" where people are taking seeds (& trees?) from the southern forests that are used to heat and planting them in the north. For example, they might take stuff from forests near Marseille, (on the Mediterranean coast), and plant them in the forests of Verdun, (northeast of Paris).

- There are 2 ways trees deal with a lack of water and heat: Option 1 is to close up their pores and stop transpiration. This way they don't run out of water, but may overheat. Option 2: Get as much water as possible and increase transpiration to cool off - but in this case if there's not enough water air bubbles will end up in the tree's veins and it'll essentially have a stroke.

Edit: formatting.

What does the article say about the pine beetle? The spread and outbreaks are well known to be correlated with higher temps.

It doesn't mention it. I'm guessing it doesn't live in France. The Government of Canada says it's native to western North America[1].

[1]https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/our-natural-resources/forests-and-fo...

I'm from around the area in France affected in this article and I never heard about any kind of "pine beetle".

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climate-change-france-for...

Ah I see what you mean now, yeah there's also a big problem with those.

> (so, plants that like heat are moving further north)

One of my current private and not yet launched projects is to map the spread of fig trees (more like fig plants) in Bucharest and the surrounding parts. The plant itself is not endemic to these parts of the continent and while it used to be present here and there it wasn't as wide-spread as it seems to be now (the winters were very detrimental to its spread). But in the last couple of years I've starting seeing more and more fig trees/plants in people's gardens, and for the moment I'm just taking photos of them and trying to post them on a searchable and browse-able map.

In the Midwest USA I just had an arborist come look at my trees yesterday. My three spruce trees are beyond saving due to a fungus. My ash and my two birch trees all need immediate treatment to save them from various borers and invasive beetles. That's over half the trees on my plot that are in trouble. As we replant forests to be carbon sinks, we really need to make sure they are diverse with tons of species so we don't have mass die offs from one problem.

Can someone fix the URL to:

https://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2019/07/24/la-sechere...

Meanwhile, also in France: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-49092653

Old farts being afraid of young women with power. I think I’ve seen that before.

Of course France also has the highest proportion of clean energy production of any major country (nuclear, hydro and 'green' energy is the vast majority of its production). It has the most rail systems, is very friendly to pedestrians, etc... So yes, for a child to lecture their parliament on green energy is counter productive. Lecture the US, Canada, Russia, etc...

unfortunately, the topic is almost inconsequential; the insults were directed ad personam, not against the arguments raised, or in other words, 'a child won't be lecturing us no matter what she has to say, we're adults and you're supposed to listen to us, not the other way around'.

How does this affect plans to sequester carbon by planting trees?

I know in Canada our forests have been a net carbon source rather than sink for almost two decades, as they burn or fall to invasive insects moving north with the warmer weather.

Obviously a tree sequesters carbon while still living. But, how likely are new forests to last in conditions of rapid changes in temperature and dryness?

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Edited to add that the article does have some comments on this indirectly, stating that since trees live a long time, they migrate too slowly for the pace of climate change we have coming. Forest experts say the french forest ecosystem won't survive.

L’étude montre aussi que les espèces qui se renouvellent en un an s’adaptent plus vite que les espèces pérennes. Mais les arbres, dont certaines essences peuvent vivre des centaines d’années, ont une mobilité trop lente pour s’adapter au réchauffement actuel. « Sur une échelle très longue, les espèces vont progressivement migrer. Mais là, le changement climatique est extrêmement rapide ! Il va s’installer sur un siècle, c’est le temps de vie de certains arbres », alerte Nicolas Viovy, du LSCE

......

Les chercheurs sont, pour l’heure, assez pessimistes. « Si on continue sur la lancée des émissions actuelles de CO2, le système forestier français ne va pas résister. Il faut changer drastiquement de mode de vie sinon les écosystèmes ne s’en sortiront pas. Mais ce qui est désolant, c’est qu’on le dit depuis les années 2000, et ça ne change rien », s’inquiète Hervé Cochard, de l’INRA. Même si Brigitte Musch estime que la situation n’est « pas encore irréversible », elle met en garde : si les arbres déclinent, « ils n’absorbent plus de gaz carbonique », ce qui « amplifie le réchauffement climatique »

To address insect infestations, I'd guess it will be key to not plant huge monocultures. That should make the new forests much more resilient to bugs and such as a whole, and allow for more rapid re-growth if/when trees do get bitten by the bug.

The overall dryness might be more of a problem.

Can't exactly help the fact that the whole boreal forest is a monoculture... Pine beetles have been able to thrive because winters haven't been cold enough to consistently kill them, although this last winter was.

> How does this affect plans to sequester carbon by planting trees?

I would guess we can still get at least 20 years of sequestration out of trees planted today. Assuming we actually figure out how to tame runaway emissions and/or sequester enough, if we keep planting more & more northward I would expect we'll hit a point where things stabilize and we don't have to keep moving north.

Or we start planting teak & palms in Winnipeg.

I live in the general area mentioned in the article, and I hike in these woods quite regularly. It's depressing and scary as hell.

We have 40+ degrees Celsius or about 104 Fahrenheit in Cologne (GER) this week. Trees are dying in the city as well, obviously faster.

We have something like 250 hectares of forest in the region East of Besançon, last summer we lost about 600 non warm climate pine trees[0]. This summer is not going to be better.

We expect to lose all of them (at the moment about 125 hectares of trees) within the next 25 years. We think about introducing pine trees from Corsica, because they can support both heat waves and cold waves. The goal is increase the amount of deciduous trees and get the new pine trees just for the diversity. You want diversity to better resist diseases and parasitic attacks.

Pine forests in France north of the 45 parallel have no heat resistant pine species and you can expect to be removed from the map if no actions are taken. Deciduous trees better support the heat waves because they lose the leaves and this reduce the drying.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinophyta

It's like this in parts of Germany as well. Really scary.

Also this is not helped by spruce bark beetle outbreaks, which seem to be worse on warm years.

USA. I see this in Oregon, Idaho, and Montana. Was just in Oregon, along the Columbia River gorge. Large streaks of dead trees through the lush forests.

A lot of this is Mountain Pine Beetle[1] though.

[1] https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/our-natural-resources/forests-and-fo...

Which is exasperated by warming temperatures. Or to be precise, less bitter cold temps in the winter that control the beetle populations.

Very few organisms die from a 1-3 degree change in average temperature (some important ones, like coral, do). The majority of biological failures we will be seeing more of over the next 100 years will be due to issues with 1-2 week extremes - either heat waves, insufficient cold extremes, or large storms from excessive evaporation, etc. Then these failures with radiate throughout the food chain when the weakest link disappears.

So this mechanism of failure is not an outlier, but the normal face of climate change effects.

Yeah, lots of pines are brown in southern German woods, and even beech trees are affected (they have deeper roots). I haven't seen something like this.

The article is not exaggerating. I hiked a bit in the Jura region this month, and I was wondering why I encountered so many dead pines.

Are there USDA hardiness zone prediction maps? I'm trying to plant a forest on a couple acres but want the trees to be alive in 50 years, so relying on current weather is probably not going to work.

With the rate of change, my guess is 50 years is optimistic.

looks like climate change is making itself worse

buy some land in Iceland or Norway, everyone will be migrating that direction.

It's not like they'll keep their forests any better though. Worse, in the boreal areas.

Iceland does not have many forests in the first place due to historical deforestation and free reign of sheep.

Change will be much more brutal closer to poles; average increase of temperature of 3 C in the world means more like 7 C increase at polar regions themselves. Moving into tropics might be easier in total, just make sure to grab high ground.

do you have any evidence for this assumption. Yet I havn't found any article about what will happen where and where to raise kids in the future with water and moderat "wether-disasters". Are there any papers out to read?

that question is one i haven't seen an answer for. maybe there isn't one.

if there will be a good place to live in 30-50 years, it won't be easy to get to, since the current (at the time) dwellers and its infrastructure won't be able to cope with 100x population increase in ~10 years and the whole thing will end in immigration camps as we see now in southern europe, just much bigger.

Poland, Belarussia. The same circulation that is sucking hot air to Western Europe is bringing back cool air to Eastern Europe.

We have cool July - evenings are so chilly that I have taken out electric blanket and dove vest. 5-8 deg C at night.

Link now gives a 404 error.

https://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2019/07/24/la-sechere...

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