Thriving B.C. forests outpace pine-beetle CO2 losses by 2020
In a rare bit of good climate change news, scientists have found that trees are growing faster in British Columbia due to global warming, and this is starting to counter the carbon-loss impacts of the province's devastating mountain pine beetle (MPB) outbreak.
The finding was made by a group of scientists working together on the Forestry Carbon Management Project—an initiative of the University of Victoria-led Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions (PICS).
Normally, forests function as what climate scientists call "carbon sinks," which means that as trees grow, they "breathe" in carbon dioxide (CO2) and store carbon in their leaves, stems, branches and roots. But the MPB epidemic that started in the late 1990s and continued through the 2000s reversed this situation, causing much more carbon to be released back into the atmosphere as the dead trees rotted. With more than 18 million hectares of forests affected, the scale of rot was so bad that it turned BC's forests from a carbon sink into a "carbon source"—a net producer of greenhouse gases just like a car, a coal-fired power plant, or a cement factory.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-04-bc-forests-outpace-pine-beetle-co2.html#jCp
