Most people do not often testify to the spectacular results of the trees struck by first -hand lightning – a fact which can lead you to believe that thunderstorms do not present a threat too great for our shadow friends. But according to the designers of a new statistical modeling program, the optimistic hypothesis is dead. If anything, lightning is an even larger tree killer than we thought before.
According to calculations published in the journal World change biology By a research team at the German Technical University of Munich (TUM), lightning is likely to destroy around 320 million trees every year. These also do not include the losses of forest fires designated by lightning; The number relates strictly to the death of individual trees.
Most lightnings never reach the earth. Instead, electric discharges are crackling more often in the clouds themselves. But as any storm guard knows, a lot of flash are still formed when negative atmospheric loads merge with columns of air loaded positively rising from the ground. Often, these aerial columns go up from large objects such as buildings, radio towers – and, of course, trees.
Previous studies on the Lightning relationship with trees are largely limited to observations on the ground of individual forests, therefore atmospheric tum scientists have chosen to approach it from a different angle. The team has combined a popular world vegetation model with sets of global lightning model data and observation data. They then carried out mathematical calculations to get an idea of the annual counting of lightning strikes.
Based on their new climate model, Lightning manages to fatally injure 320 million trees per year, between 2.1 and 2.9% of the annual loss of vegetable biomass. But that’s not all they have evaluated.
“We are now able not only to estimate how many trees die of love at first sight each year, but also to identify the most affected regions and to assess the implications for global carbon storage and the forest structure,” said Andreas Krause, main study of the study and atmospheric scientist TUM in a press release.
The Krause team estimates that the decomposition of the biomass of trees struck by lightning emits 0.77 to 1.09 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide each year, a much higher range than the figures spent. In ecology, biomass generally refers to the total quantity of organic matter in an ecosystem. The number even addresses around 1.26 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per each year released by Plantlife during forest fires. That said, forest fires always eclipse the lightning statistics by a large margin – exceeding 5.85 billion tonnes each year, including dead wood and organic soil material.
Researchers believe that their conclusions highlight the importance of taking into account the death of lightning trees in climatology studies. Unfortunately, this is all the more pressing since the amount will probably increase in the quasi-future.
“Most climate models are planning to increase the frequency of lightning in the coming decades, so it is worth paying particular attention to this largely neglected disturbance,” said Krause.
