Well sure, it is very nice to run in the forest trails in this stabile hot sunny weather, week after week, month after month… although newly back home after another 14 K run it is easy to conclude that there is another flip of that coin: our trees are very stressed and are dying too fast. The words resilience and sustainability have never been more razor sharp than now in forestry.
And look – if you have any doubts – what is gooing on:
And check out latest initiated assessment for possible causes here:
Anomalies in yet stream according to melting ice – Loss of sea ice enhancing high pressure waves (no longer available. Instead read Arctic warming here)
You can follow yet-wind patterns over time here:
Earth (select height at 250 hPa)
A quick rainfall now will alter tree branch density and, as have been seen several summers now, parts of seemingly healthy, vital trees are breaking into pieces. When it happens, the crack and break can make quite a noise. Reason? The big CC-logger is working (*)? Well, the wood texture is altered and resembles the winter formulas for surviving. But the leaves or needles are on, ready to soak up any moist. Add on this heavy winds… And, as this company has counceled many years ago, add also the freeze drying after a too early spring heat with resulting in early buds and tiny blossoms, but then an almost arctic cold through back, for a few weeks… Again stress on trees. A stress that grows into the ”tree memory”. (And as well, another devastating impact on pollinators already facing an extinct debt…)
The above is very much ongoing in the midth region of Scandinavia. But, luckily, this year it was a pretty good snow melting after an extended warm fall and winter season into the 20th of januar – the temperatures dropped down to the freezing point first in the late januar. The period between november and this date was grey, warm and wet. Good for mosses and soil (fungi, bacteria et c, literally soil remediation), but not really typical midth swedish winter weather. Again stress on trees looking for the winter signal to go to rest…
So, luckily, the water and moist filled up the ground horizon quite a bit in the end of 2017 and early winter 2018. This buffer was extremely important for the trees this early spring just before this now-ongoing-soon-three-months-long-hot-severe-drought appeared. But the true story remains to be written: at least half of the summer in this latitude is up for the call. What weather will it bring?
Hold your thumbs and admire our trees and forest ecosystems! Our friends… And their capacity as a crucial carbon zink is diminished as trees lower the photsyntesis significantly due to lack of water! Trees are struggling extremely hard now in this drought.
/Tree greetings and keep up the good honest job for sound changes and positive spirit
News update 13 july 2018 from the Guardiuan here…
(*) Climate Change, but CC may also stand for Clear Cut in forestry. Thus a little play with words and their in depth purport.