{"id":3628,"date":"2022-12-09T08:45:08","date_gmt":"2022-12-09T08:45:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thepoetryofscience.peachpuff-wolverine-566518.hostingersite.com\/?p=3628"},"modified":"2022-12-09T08:45:08","modified_gmt":"2022-12-09T08:45:08","slug":"risky-resilience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/thepoetryofscience\/3628\/risky-resilience\/","title":{"rendered":"Risky Resilience"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cloaks of brown and green
\nhuddle close to sustain
\nshared lives and leaves,
\nshifting in time to
\nbend,
\nnot break
\nwith the wind –
\ncatching each blow
\nto regulate,
\nmature,
\nand grow.
\nBut western fronts
\nbring harsher times –
\nplagues of
\ninsects,
\nheat,
\nand drought
\nthat push and pull
\nwith rigid doubt.
\nA final recoil to
\na stark,
\nuntimely end.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
A forest at the headwaters of Ritchie Run, Clinton County in the United States, at the West Branch Forest Preserve (Image Credit: Nicholas_T via Flickr).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This poem is inspired by recent research<\/a>, which has found that in the Western United States, an increase in forest resilience is linked with a higher mortality risk for trees.<\/p>\n

Large-scale forest mortality events have been globally observed over the past few decades in response to a changing climate of severe droughts, heatwaves, and outbreaks of pests and diseases. Likewise, forest resilience is a measure of adaptability. It focuses on retaining a forest\u2019s essential structure and composition to a range of stresses or complex disturbances. A forest\u2019s resilience, or ability to absorb environmental disturbances, has long been thought to be a boost for its odds of survival against such events.<\/p>\n

However, in this new study, for some forests in the Western United States, a different relationship has been observed. By using more than three decades of satellite image data for assessing forest resilience and comparing it to more than two decades of ground observations of forest tree death across the continental United States, the researchers have shown that while high ecosystem resilience correlates with low mortality in eastern forests, it is linked to high mortality in western regions. This unexpected resilience\u2013mortality relation could be driven by regional factors such as insect populations, resource competition, and drier climates, all of which are heavily influenced by climate change. Whatever the reason for this relationship, the findings have implications for future predictions of forest mortality events, especially in response to the ever-changing climate.<\/p>\n