The forests most at risk of drought mortality are in the Mediterranean, southern Australia, and the northwest Amazon and the United States.
This emerges from a study carried out by the Center for Ecological Research and Forest Applications (CREAF), in which the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) participates, and whose aim was to identify the forests most affected by water shortages.
CREAF researcher Pablo Sanchez-Martinez is the lead author of the study, which is part of his doctoral thesis and was published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.
The main novelty of the new method is that it evaluates the forest as a whole ecosystem, a set of organisms that respond differently to external conditions, which makes it possible to predict the effects of climate change on forests around the world on a much larger scale. the world.
To identify the forests most affected by drought, the work includes a new method that characterizes them from a broad and holistic perspective in the face of water shortages.
To do this, researchers considered physiological data on the strategies thousands of species use to overcome water shortages, evolutionary and phylogenetic data on how adaptation to drought has evolved, and soil and climate data from all biomes around the world.
According to the researcher, “the physiological data by species shows us that many trees in the Mediterranean are very well adapted to drought.” Nevertheless, our model suggests that there is a very high risk of drought-related mortality in these forests because “species , which are very sensitive to drought, coexist” and there are recurring and long-lasting episodes of water shortage.
Researchers Maurizio Mencuccini and Jordi Martínez-Vilalta conducted the study together with Pablo Sánchez-Martínez.