Dying trees

During a recent visit to Montgomery's Oakwood Cemetery, I noticed a large number of big old trees were dead or dying.


     Some of the trees are covered with Spanish Moss (which is not necessarily bad for the trees, unless the tree is so filed with it, it blocks sunlight from hitting the leaves). 

    Trees absorb carbon dioxide, and an article in this month's National Geographic suggests increased temperatures caused by climate change are contributing to tree deaths. The lead author is Nate McDowell, an earth scientist at the U.S. Energy Department’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

"McDowell and several colleagues began pondering how tree loss would alter forests’ ability to sequester CO2—and how to better predict such devastation in the future. A decade later, a co-worker examined tree rings and past temperature swings and found a relationship between heat and tree deaths. Then he simulated how the forest would change based on temperature projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The results suggested that by 2050, normal temperatures in the Southwest could be similar to rare past heat waves that led to severe tree-killing droughts. “That was really frightening,” McDowell says.

                                                                                          National Geographic article

Montgomery Urban Forrester Russell Stringer tells us the cemetery trees are, well, very old:

"What you are seeing in Oakwood cemetery can best be described as 'complications due to extreme age'.  Trees don’t heal like people do, and injuries accumulate over time (time measured in centuries in some cases).  Eventually the trees will succumb.  Think of it as the straw that breaks the camel’s back."

     Trees also fall because of storms. One that blew through Montgomery on April 13th sent many trees crashing to the ground. A police officer told Alabama News Network at least a thousand trees were downed in the city alone.

But Stringer says the number from the April storm was not that high: "The tree number was probably closer to 100, so yes a slight exaggeration. "