British Columbia's forests to be 'marched' north?
Unless they're starring in the closing scenes of Macbeth, groves aren't famous for moving. But entire forests may be 'marched' to cooler climes to protect them from climate change if the government of British Columbia gets its way, writes Emma Marris in the journal Nature.
Scientists worry that British Columbia's rapidly warming climate (the region has already warmed 0.7C in the decade leading up to 2006 - nearly as much as the world has warmed in the last century) will trigger outbreaks of heat-loving pests and drought, wiping out the province's lucrative forests.
With so much at stake (stuff made of wood accounts for about half of the province's ), it's no surprise that the has already launched a project to see how seedlings fare after they've been dug up and transplanted to cooler environments in the north.
The ',' is uprooting seedlings from 40 spots in British Columbia, Washington State, Oregon and Idaho and replanting them in new environments to see if they flourish or fail.
It's an audacious, aggressive experiment yet it has been derided as 'a waste of time' by Daniel Simberloff, an ecologist at the University of Tennessee. Why?
Firstly, because trees don't adapt well to new environments. ('Douglas fir grows from Mexico City to central British Columbia, but move it 700-metres elevation downhill at any location, and you will be growing toothpicks,' says Greg O' Neill, a research scientist working on the transplantation project.)
And what's more, some conservationists worry that the transplanted trees will make themselves too at home: 'there is just too great a chance that the translocated trees, or the diseases they host, will become invasive', warns Dr Simberloff.
And then there's the possibility that Greg O' Neill is worrying needlessly about the fate of British Columbia's forests: according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, rising concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could create bigger trees and boost the forestry industry in some regions.
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