Overview
- The Nature Plants study reanalysed records for 203,721 trees across 2,724 sites, excluding logging, fires and other obvious disturbances to isolate background mortality.
- Mortality rates rose consistently across four major biomes, with the steepest increases in hotter, drier regions such as tropical savannas and tropical rainforests.
- Annual deaths in tropical savannas climbed from about 1.5% in 1996 to 2.7% in 2017, while tropical rainforests more than doubled from 0.5% in 1963 to 1.3% in 2020.
- Warm temperate forests saw mortality rates rise from 0.2% in 1943 to 0.7% in 2018, and cool temperate forests increased from 0.4% in 1966 to 0.7% in 2019.
- Researchers say the trend is very likely driven by climate-related warming and drying, warn that deaths now exceed growth, and note a sharp drop in active monitoring plots that hinders future tracking.