Climate impacts such as dry, hot summers reduce the growth and increase the mortality of trees in the Black Forest because they negatively influence the climatic water balance, i.e., the difference between precipitation and potential evapotranspiration. That is the central finding of a long-term study of the influence of climate and climate change on trees in the Black Forest conducted by Prof. Dr. Hans-Peter Kahle and Prof. Dr. Heinrich Spiecker, who are both professors of forest growth and dendroecology at the University of Freiburg.
At that time, however, a maximum of 12% of the sustainable annual growth died off, yet the mortality rate after extremely dry summers in recent years has increased to 40% of sustainable annual growth. Sustainable growth describes the sum of the average annual growth of wood which is used as a basis for calculating the annual allowable sustainable timber harvest.
Time series of observed and modeled tree mortality over time in the Black Forest. The observed mortality from 1953 to 2020 is presented in red bars. The blue bars describe the modeled mortality from 1881 to 2020 based on the climatic water balance, and the green bars describe the modeled mortality from 1900 to 2020 based on the annual radial growth rate index. Credit: Heinrich Spiecker
In 2019, mortality reached a peak at more than seven times the average mortality rate in the period from 1953 to 2017. Kahle elaborates,"What is also striking is a certain regularity in the occurrence of cool-humid and warm-dry periods that repeated themselves in the past around every fourteen years. But we've observed that the cool-humid periods are becoming weaker while the warm-dry periods are getting more severe.
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