BANDAR SERI BEGAWAN, Brunei – Ferry Slik jumps in his jeep and heads west of Brunei’s capital. After an hour on the well-paved road, it stops at the shoulder of the road and is parked, in the middle of nowhere.
But the Dutchman, who has lived in Brunei since 2013, knows exactly where he is. When he was pulled out of his car, he slid into the Andulau Forest Reserve. thick as thumbs, the botanist digs up the men he searches for in about 20 minutes.
One is perched on top of a giant aluminum staircase with a pair of stirrups in his hand, measuring a thick tree trunk, calling numbers and a teammate scribbles them underneath, noticing other main points such as the coordinates of the tree and still alive. , a third type nearby selects some dirt in a small plastic tube.
In the dry season since 2016, Slik and his team have spent up to 8 weeks inspecting some 560 giant trees on this 15-hectare forest plot. The hikes continued until 2021, as COVID-19 has left the small Southeast Asian country rich in oil. unscathed.
Looking at the diameter of each tree, its environmental soil and weather conditions, and other measurements, Slik and his colleagues look for data on “how giant trees live, grow and die,” as he says. This month, Professor Darussalam at the University of Brunei published a new study on expansion rates, adding a little more to the still-limited global understanding of these herbal giants.
But what is at stake is far more vital than the undeniable satisfaction of educational curiosity: giant trees are vulnerable to climate change and in our combat they oppose it, and its numbers are declining.
Present all over the world, some giant trees exceed one hundred meters of glass and nine meters wide. Iconic species come with California’s giant redwoods and redwoods on the west coast of the United States, as well as South Australian sorbier.
In Asia, the maximum number of giant trees, vaguely explained as those with a circumference of at least 50 centimeters, or the maximum sensitive 1% of trees in a given forest, belong to the family of dipterocarpals, which can reach 60 meters in height without problems.
Dipterocarpos are very because they are forging furniture.
“Foresters have been reading advertising species for some time, yet their top priority is wood quality,” Slik told Nikkei Asia. “And they only cover a fraction of the wonderful tree species. “
There’s still a lot to discover. ” We don’t even have an intelligent review of the maximum length of tropical tree species and how this relates to their evolutionary history or express traits,” he said.
However, there is little doubt about the nature of the trees.
“There is no doubt that the largest trees in forests play a disproportionate role in the functioning of an ecosystem,” said Stuart Davies, director of the Forest Global Earth Observatory (ForestGEO) at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. “Although forest giants account for only 1% of all trees, they account for more than part of a forest’s total biomass. And if they change, they have serious repercussions. “
Large trees help a forest’s carbon and nutrient cycles, replace the amount of rain and groundwater available, and calculate how much sunlight is obtained through the small trees underground.
“There is also enormous diversity,” said Matt Bradford, a botanist at the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO). “Many animals, plants and insects live in hollows and flowers and in all branches. “
In addition, giant trees store an immense amount of carbon, separating it from the environment and locking it up for many years to come. Because forest giants identify as a vital buffer that opposes climate change, they are now generating “huge interest” compared to a decade ago, according to Bradford.
However, it is worrying that trees are declining around the world. In California’s Yosemite National Park, for example, its number fell to 25% between the 1930s and 1990s. 5. 1 in 1997.
The biggest culprit, something he has replaced in 40 years, is deforestation, Arshad Ali said of Nanjing Forestry University.
Deforestation can also exacerbate the effects of a momentary threat: drought conditions. Logging leaves a forest in fragments and the trees along those small plots tend to be exposed to drier, windier conditions.
“Large trees have a hydrological formula that is very delicate for small trees,” Ali said. Higher temperatures mean thirsty trees have to paint harder to suck water from the ground to the leaves, a task that is already stressful when a tree is 20 stories long.
“In Southeast Asia, the El Niño Southern Oscillation, or ENSO, the chances are drought-related,” said Davies of ForestGEO. “These droughts cause abundant flowering in the forest, but they can also lead to increased tree mortality. “
Large trees, he added, “can be vulnerable to those droughts. “
In fact, an experiment conducted on a small plot of forest in the Amazon revealed that when simulating drought situations, giant canopy trees were 4. 5 times more likely to die, twice the rate of small trees.
While global warming can lead to other problems, Bradford said we’ll see the effects of climate being replaced in tall trees during our lifetime. “No, unless there is an incredibly immediate accumulation of temperature and precipitation, which is starting to kill the trees,” he said.
Still, he emphasized, this doesn’t mean we can stand by. “We have to fight climate change because it is and there are still massive forest spaces that we must continue to maintain,” he said. are that climate replacement will make tall trees grow faster and die faster. But we’re still not sure how much faster. “
That’s why forest plots like Slik’s in Brunei are vital. “There are very few plots dedicated in particular to the examination of tall trees,” Slik said, noting that he knew only a comparable position in Costa Rica. “But their site is very different from ours because it is in the seasonal tropics and also because they only have about thirty species of giant trees, while our plot 131 species. “
In addition, there are other plots in Southeast Asia, as well as in China and Australia, which are home to giant trees but where the studios are only faithful to their study.
Experts hope that, together, studies at all these sites will help solve the many mysteries surrounding tall trees. Alik has advanced: the study he published this month, in the journal Biotropica, points out how trees elsewhere in his Andulau plot have grown at the same rate despite diversifications in soil fertility and water availability.
Davies said it was good news that those herbal wonders are attracting more attention, he warned that we will have to be careful not to lose the forest to the trees. “The tall trees are lovely because they are so iconic, but the forest is much more than the big trees. It comprises all those other pieces, such as primates, calms and all the little insects and microbes, which we also have to stay in the brain. “
However, he says, tall trees “hold together. “
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