The hunt for large trees in New Hampshire is a delightful pasttime, which is why I have written about it many times.
But another story is always fun, so check out this piece from New Hampshire Bulletin, the independent online news source, which notes the climate-change angle. (There’s always a climate-change angle.)
While it’s “mostly just fun,” Wallace said, the whole affair speaks to the significance of larger, older trees in the broader ecosystem, particularly through a climate change lens.
“Big trees do have a large role to play in taking up carbon,” Wallace explained. “They are such major repositories of carbon. A big oak, a big pine, a big sugar maple. The big trees are really good at absorbing a lot more. They photosynthesize very efficiently.”
That’s why “old growth” forests are so important, scientists say, because they can trap much more carbon – the leading greenhouse gas contributing to climate change – than newly planted or younger trees. Last year, a new analysis of more than 20,000 trees also showed that old-growth trees are more tolerant of drought and may be better at withstanding future climate extrem
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It would be interesting if there could be an easy and accurate way to factor in the age of large tree winners, but I can also understand the complications of doing so. I often wonder about the age of enormous trees I’ve seen; for example, behemoth redwood trees I’ve seen in California. Imagine seeing living trees that were saplings when the earliest cathedrals were being built in Europe (e.g., St. Denis, France, mid-12th C.).
While not as old as redwoods, I miss the towering elms on Main Street in Concord, and elsewhere in town in the 1970s.