Whenever I fly to or from the Houston, I am always amazed at the vast greenery the city has to offer that I am able to view from my airplane window during descent and ascent. Although many look at Houston as an overcrowded, sprawling, and polluted metropolis, I absolutely love the place and its many large trees are a big reason why.

While I often feed my appetite for being around these gorgeous and majestic plants by taking strolls through the beautiful Memorial Park, sometimes I crave something a little more and my ‘go-to’ place throughout life has always been Yosemite National Park in California. Therefore, when I read about a recent study conducted by a team from the US Geological Survey and the University of Washington that concluded that the number of large trees in this awe-inspiring park has been on a steady decline over the past century, I was truly saddened.

To conduct the study, the research team compared the earliest records of large-diameter trees densities from the 1930s to more recent records from the 1990s and found that in this period alone, about 24% of these large trees vanished.

Unfortunately, the implications of this decline are far more wide ranging than reducing my number of trips to Yosemite every couple of years; a rapid decline in large trees as noted by this study means the habitat loss of countless species of plants and animals. Furthermore, large-diameter trees are better at resisting forest fires than are there smaller counterparts so we can expect the number of these devastating disasters to also increase in the coming years. This is especially true if we consider the fact that there is now increasing evidence for the hypothesis that there is an ongoing shift from fire-tolerant to fire intolerant trees in the region.

“Although this study did not investigate the causes of decline, climate change is a likely contributor to these events and should be taken into consideration,” said USGS scientist emeritus Jan Van Wagtendonk. I suspect that this is just one of many future studies that will continue to find more and more potential negative effects of climate change on our environment in the coming years.

Discussion Question: Do you think that it is really the effects of global warming that are at play here, or are there other possible reasons you can think of for this marked decline? What are these other reasons?

News Article: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090729132117.htm
Journal Article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.foreco.2009.03.009