Australian forest study may challenge climate change optimism
As Australia's forests burned earlier this year, people around the world worried about the impact of all that smoke on our climate.
At the same time, researchers in New South Wales were finalising a study looking at the capacity for forests to consume and store carbon from the atmosphere.
The results were not comforting.
In fact, they cast doubt over many of the climate models being used to predict carbon levels into the future.
A forest of cranes
In a unique experiment, Professor Belinda Medlyn and her team from Western Sydney University pumped carbon from a commercial supplier into a forest of 90-year-old trees.
They laid pipelines and built tubular structures in the forest to deliver the carbon into the air above the canopy.
For four years they kept the carbon levels 38 per cent higher than normal while they tracked the movement of carbon through the forest ecosystem and they built cranes to take them high enough to measure the results.
They looked at how the trees and the plants in the understory take up the CO2 and found that it passes through the ecosystem in a number of different ways, according to Professor Medlyn.
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