Worrisome growth pattern
Every spring, as the weather warms, trees up and down the East Coast explode in a display of bright green life as leaves fill their branches, and every fall, the same leaves provide one of nature’s great color displays of vivid yellow, orange, and red. Thanks to climate change, the timing of those events has shifted over the last two decades, Harvard scientists say. Andrew Richardson, an associate professor of organismic and evolutionary biology, and research associate Trevor Keenan worked with colleagues from seven different institutions on a study that found that forests throughout the eastern United States are showing signs of spring growth dramatically earlier, and that the growing season in some areas extends further into the fall. The expanded growing season, they say, has enabled forests to store as much as 26 million metric tons more CO2 than before. The work is described in a June 1 paper published in...