News
New Article in Agricultural and Forest Meteorology
3 Jun 2026
How do trees handle changes in water availability as our planet is getting warmer?
Global warming causes more frequent droughts, higher evapotranspiration and can even increase precipitation in some places. But we still don’t entirely know how these effects impact a tree's moisture sensitivity (how much a tree's growth relies on having enough water) over time.
In anew article that was published in Agricultural and Forest Meteorology and to which our colleague David Gampe contributed, Song et al. have analyzed, how factors like the local climate and a tree species' capacity for water uptake, transport, use and loss (hydraulic traits) influence how trees react to changing water availability.
Using tree ring analysis, climate and data modeling, and computer simulations they found:
- Moisture Limitations: Tree growth in 78.4% of studied trees was limited by moisture availability, with about half showing increasing sensitivity and half showing decreasing sensitivity over time.
- Climate Zone Effects: In already dry, water-limited forests (like woodlands and seasonal forests), warming makes trees even more sensitive to drought. But in cold, energy-limited forests (like the Arctic tundra), warming actually reduces moisture sensitivity, likely because it melts ice and permafrost, providing unexpected water in the spring.
- Counterintuitive adaptation: The researchers expected drought-adapted trees (species built to survive dry climates) to handle the warming best. Instead, they found that drought-adapted species became much more limited by water as temperatures rose. The sheer intensity of the higher drought stress essentially overrode their natural defenses.
Functioning forests absorb carbon dioxide and are one of our best defenses against climate change. Understanding how they react to a warming climate is important so that we can manage them properly and effectively. Otherwise, climate warming could cause our forests to die, and instead of absorbing CO2, potentially even releasing massive amounts of carbon back into the atmosphere.