Bigger and better. That's the message being sent by researchers who monitored 673,046 trees from 403 species and determined that the larger a tree gets, the more carbon it captures. Trees 80 years or older also grow faster than their younger counterparts. "The trees that are adding the most mass are the biggest ones, and that holds pretty much everywhere on Earth that we looked," Nathan Stephenson, the study's lead author and an ecologist at the U.S. Geological Survey in Three Rivers, Calif., told Nature, the international weekly journal of science that published the study. "Trees have the equivalent of an adolescent growth spurt, but it just keeps going."
As the Los Angeles Times reported, this research suggests that big trees are doing more than storing carbon: "They're fixing large amounts of it with continued rapid growth, every year adding a little more mass to their trunks, limbs and leaves. … That does not mean, however, that on a forest level, old stands capture more carbon overall than young stands. Young forests are denser, with more trees, and when old trees die, they release carbon back into the atmosphere."
Nevertheless, researchers claim, the study resolves conflicting assumptions about the nature of tree growth, informs efforts to understand and model forest carbon dynamics, and provides additional implications for theories of resource allocation.
