
Forests and climate change: pine trees dying in France - zoobab
https://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2019/07/24/la-secheresse-et-la-canicule-deciment-les-forets-francaises_5492869_3244.html
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jbeales
Quick translation: Because of heat waves and droughts, the coniferous forests
of France are drying out and dying.

A few interesting points:

\- Plants with a short lifecycle migrate pretty quickly with climate change,
(so, plants that like heat are moving further north). Trees, because they have
a long life cycle, don't move at the same pace, so more are dying.

\- There's a government project called "Project Giono" where people are taking
seeds (& trees?) from the southern forests that are used to heat and planting
them in the north. For example, they might take stuff from forests near
Marseille, (on the Mediterranean coast), and plant them in the forests of
Verdun, (northeast of Paris).

\- There are 2 ways trees deal with a lack of water and heat: Option 1 is to
close up their pores and stop transpiration. This way they don't run out of
water, but may overheat. Option 2: Get as much water as possible and increase
transpiration to cool off - but in this case if there's not enough water air
bubbles will end up in the tree's veins and it'll essentially have a stroke.

Edit: formatting.

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avip
What does the article say about the pine beetle? The spread and outbreaks are
well known to be correlated with higher temps.

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realusername
I'm from around the area in France affected in this article and I never heard
about any kind of "pine beetle".

~~~
avip
[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climate-change-france-
for...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climate-change-france-
forests/french-forests-scarred-as-heatwaves-bring-bark-beetle-infestation-
idUSKCN1UE20S)

~~~
realusername
Ah I see what you mean now, yeah there's also a big problem with those.

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goda90
In the Midwest USA I just had an arborist come look at my trees yesterday. My
three spruce trees are beyond saving due to a fungus. My ash and my two birch
trees all need immediate treatment to save them from various borers and
invasive beetles. That's over half the trees on my plot that are in trouble.
As we replant forests to be carbon sinks, we really need to make sure they are
diverse with tons of species so we don't have mass die offs from one problem.

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zoobab
Can someone fix the URL to:

[https://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2019/07/24/la-
sechere...](https://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2019/07/24/la-secheresse-
et-la-canicule-deciment-les-forets-francaises_5492869_3244.html)

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janpot
Meanwhile, also in France: [https://www.bbc.com/news/world-
europe-49092653](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-49092653)

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baq
Old farts being afraid of young women with power. I think I’ve seen that
before.

~~~
Mikeb85
Of course France also has the highest proportion of clean energy production of
any major country (nuclear, hydro and 'green' energy is the vast majority of
its production). It has the most rail systems, is very friendly to
pedestrians, etc... So yes, for a child to lecture their parliament on green
energy is counter productive. Lecture the US, Canada, Russia, etc...

~~~
baq
unfortunately, the topic is almost inconsequential; the insults were directed
ad personam, not against the arguments raised, or in other words, 'a child
won't be lecturing us no matter what she has to say, we're adults and you're
supposed to listen to us, not the other way around'.

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graeme
How does this affect plans to sequester carbon by planting trees?

I know in Canada our forests have been a net carbon source rather than sink
for almost two decades, as they burn or fall to invasive insects moving north
with the warmer weather.

Obviously a tree sequesters carbon while still living. But, how likely are new
forests to last in conditions of rapid changes in temperature and dryness?

\-------

Edited to add that the article does have some comments on this indirectly,
stating that since trees live a long time, they migrate too slowly for the
pace of climate change we have coming. Forest experts say the french forest
ecosystem won't survive.

L’étude montre aussi que les espèces qui se renouvellent en un an s’adaptent
plus vite que les espèces pérennes. Mais les arbres, dont certaines essences
peuvent vivre des centaines d’années, ont une mobilité trop lente pour
s’adapter au réchauffement actuel. « Sur une échelle très longue, les espèces
vont progressivement migrer. Mais là, le changement climatique est extrêmement
rapide ! Il va s’installer sur un siècle, c’est le temps de vie de certains
arbres », alerte Nicolas Viovy, du LSCE

......

Les chercheurs sont, pour l’heure, assez pessimistes. « Si on continue sur la
lancée des émissions actuelles de CO2, le système forestier français ne va pas
résister. Il faut changer drastiquement de mode de vie sinon les écosystèmes
ne s’en sortiront pas. Mais ce qui est désolant, c’est qu’on le dit depuis les
années 2000, et ça ne change rien », s’inquiète Hervé Cochard, de l’INRA. Même
si Brigitte Musch estime que la situation n’est « pas encore irréversible »,
elle met en garde : si les arbres déclinent, « ils n’absorbent plus de gaz
carbonique », ce qui « amplifie le réchauffement climatique »

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black_puppydog
To address insect infestations, I'd guess it will be key to not plant huge
monocultures. That should make the new forests much more resilient to bugs and
such as a whole, and allow for more rapid re-growth if/when trees do get
bitten by the bug.

The overall dryness might be more of a problem.

~~~
Mikeb85
Can't exactly help the fact that the whole boreal forest is a monoculture...
Pine beetles have been able to thrive because winters haven't been cold enough
to consistently kill them, although this last winter was.

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OneFamousGrouse
I live in the general area mentioned in the article, and I hike in these woods
quite regularly. It's depressing and scary as hell.

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mrleiter
We have 40+ degrees Celsius or about 104 Fahrenheit in Cologne (GER) this
week. Trees are dying in the city as well, obviously faster.

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Loic
We have something like 250 hectares of forest in the region East of Besançon,
last summer we lost about 600 non warm climate pine trees[0]. This summer is
not going to be better.

We expect to lose all of them (at the moment about 125 hectares of trees)
within the next 25 years. We think about introducing pine trees from Corsica,
because they can support both heat waves and cold waves. The goal is increase
the amount of deciduous trees and get the new pine trees just for the
diversity. You want diversity to better resist diseases and parasitic attacks.

Pine forests in France north of the 45 parallel have no heat resistant pine
species and you can expect to be removed from the map if no actions are taken.
Deciduous trees better support the heat waves because they lose the leaves and
this reduce the drying.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinophyta](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinophyta)

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bristleworm
It's like this in parts of Germany as well. Really scary.

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linuxlizard
USA. I see this in Oregon, Idaho, and Montana. Was just in Oregon, along the
Columbia River gorge. Large streaks of dead trees through the lush forests.

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jbeales
A lot of this is Mountain Pine Beetle[1] though.

[1] [https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/our-natural-resources/forests-and-
fo...](https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/our-natural-resources/forests-and-
forestry/wildland-fires-insects-and-disturbances/top-forest-insects-and-
diseases-canada/mountain-pine-beetle/13381)

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ridewinter
Which is exasperated by warming temperatures. Or to be precise, less bitter
cold temps in the winter that control the beetle populations.

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sgc
Very few organisms die from a 1-3 degree change in average temperature (some
important ones, like coral, do). The majority of biological failures we will
be seeing more of over the next 100 years will be due to issues with 1-2 week
extremes - either heat waves, insufficient cold extremes, or large storms from
excessive evaporation, etc. Then these failures with radiate throughout the
food chain when the weakest link disappears.

So this mechanism of failure is not an outlier, but the normal face of climate
change effects.

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wcoenen
The article is not exaggerating. I hiked a bit in the Jura region this month,
and I was wondering why I encountered so many dead pines.

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CalRobert
Are there USDA hardiness zone prediction maps? I'm trying to plant a forest on
a couple acres but want the trees to be alive in 50 years, so relying on
current weather is probably not going to work.

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mempko
With the rate of change, my guess is 50 years is optimistic.

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ptah
looks like climate change is making itself worse

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galangalalgol
buy some land in Iceland or Norway, everyone will be migrating that direction.

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baq
Change will be much more brutal closer to poles; average increase of
temperature of 3 C in the world means more like 7 C increase at polar regions
themselves. Moving into tropics might be easier in total, just make sure to
grab high ground.

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n8ur
do you have any evidence for this assumption. Yet I havn't found any article
about what will happen where and where to raise kids in the future with water
and moderat "wether-disasters". Are there any papers out to read?

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baq
that question is one i haven't seen an answer for. maybe there isn't one.

if there will be a good place to live in 30-50 years, it won't be easy to get
to, since the current (at the time) dwellers and its infrastructure won't be
able to cope with 100x population increase in ~10 years and the whole thing
will end in immigration camps as we see now in southern europe, just much
bigger.

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ryanmercer
Link now gives a 404 error.

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workingpatrick
[https://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2019/07/24/la-
sechere...](https://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2019/07/24/la-secheresse-
et-la-canicule-deciment-les-forets-francaises_5492869_3244.html)

