Trees growing faster

“Forests in the northern hemisphere could be growing faster now than they were 200 years ago as a result of climate change according to a study of trees in eastern America,” Steve Connor writes for The Independent. “The trees appear to have accelerated growth rates due to longer growing seasons and higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Scientists have documented the changes to the growth of 55 plots of mixed hardwood forest over a period of 22 years and have concluded that they are probably growing faster now than they have done at any time in the past 225 years – the age of the oldest trees in the study. Geoffrey Parker, a forest ecologist at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater, Md., said that the increase in the rate of growth was unexpected.…”