Old West has fastest tree border yet.With old aerial photographs of New Mexico, researchers have documented the swiftest climate-caused forest shift on record. A drought during the 1950s pushed a ponderosa pine ponderosa pine pinusponderosa. forest back 2 kilometers in less than 5 years, report Craig D. Allen of the U.S. Geological Survey in Los Alamos, N.M., and David D. Breshears of Los Alamos National Laboratory Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) (previously known at various times as Site Y, Los Alamos Laboratory, and Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory) is a United States Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratory, managed and operated by Los Alamos National . As the more drought-sensitive ponderosas died back at the edges of the forest, a mix of pinon Pinon (pī`nŏn), in the Bible, one of the dukes of Edom. and junipers took their place. The drought ended decades ago. Yet the ponderosa pines have not grown back to their former limits. These research results appear in the Dec. 8, 1998 PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, usually referred to as PNAS, is the official journal of the United States National Academy of Sciences. . Previous studies of such sweeping forest changes made do with less precise methods, like analyzing pollen, tree rings, or pack rat pack rat, rodent of the genus Neotoma, of North and Central America, noted for its habit of collecting bright, shiny objects and leaving other objects, such as nuts or pebbles, in their place; also called trade rat or wood rat. debris. This work has documented shifts over the course of decades or even millennia, the researchers explain. The faster shift confirms predictions from researchers studying how climate change might affect vegetation, Breshears says. "The modelers are out there saying that this [rapid change] is going to happen." |
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