Thread by @DaveBreshears

#ESA2020 It's the 5th anniversary of our Allen @DaveBreshears @McDowell_Trees publication in @ESAEcosphere Centennial Special Issue:

On underestimation of global vulnerability to tree mortality and forest die‐off from hotter drought in the Anthropocene

esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.18…

Despite tons of citations, they mostly just say lots of tree die-off happening. The real messages of this paper are:

i) we need to look more holistically at ten categories affecting greater and lesser vulnerability of tree mortality

Green and brown out rings in this fig

ii) We also present a set of global vulnerability drivers that are known with high confidence (Red text in fig): (1) droughts eventually occur everywhere; (2) warming produces hotter droughts; (3) atmospheric moisture demand increases nonlinearly with temperature during drought;

(4) mortality can occur faster in hotter drought, consistent with fundamental physiology; (5) shorter droughts occur more frequently than longer droughts and can become lethal under warming, increasing the frequency of lethal drought nonlinearly;

and (6) mortality happens rapidly relative to growth intervals needed for forest recovery.

We hope this can still stimulate more conversation about a more holistic perspective of factors related to tree mortality and more focus on those factors we know at this time with high confidence - the planet needs us to get mortality risk out there asap

esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.18…