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Satellites Reveal a Browning Forest

These were not the questions that Goetz set out to
answer when he began his analysis of satellite imagery
of the Northern forests of North America. He had
wanted to know how the forests use carbon dioxide as
they recover from fire so he could determine the
impact of fire on the carbon cycle. As Goetz expected,
the satellite data showed that the newly burned forest
was greening up as it recovered to pre-burn
conditions. But in the surrounding unburned forest,
growth was slowing down, and that surprised Goetz.
Earlier work suggested greening in the Northern
Hemisphere and an increase in the growing-season
length, says Goetz.


He decided to take a closer look at the unburned
forest, enlisting the help of Woods Hole colleagues
Andrew Bunn, an ecologist with experience tracking
change in the forests, and Richard Houghton, a senior
scientist and carbon expert who had spent years
studying the global carbon budget.
The group studied data collected by the Advanced
Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) series of
satellite sensors, which have been in orbit since 1981.
When sunlight hits the surface of the Earth, some of it
bounces back into space, and this is what the satellites
measure. Plants reflect light depending on how fast or
how much they are growing, says Bunn. The different
light that they reflect depends on how green they are
and how much photosynthesis is happening. By
measuring that greenness, we can infer how much
production is happening. Production, he explains, is
how much carbon plants take out of the atmosphere
and turn into organic material like leaves and stems
through photosynthesis.
To measure forest greenness with satellite data,
scientists often create a low-to-high vegetation scale,
or index. The Global Inventory Mapping and Monitoring
(GIMMS) group at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
has produced such vegetation index maps for every
15-day period that the AVHRR sensors have been in
space. To track the change in Northern forests
greenness, Goetz and research assistant Greg Fiske
gathered all of the 15-day vegetation index maps that
the GIMMS group had produced for 1981 to 2003. We
stacked all the 15-day periods on top of each other and
looked at how each point in space was changing over
time, explains Bunn. The trend that emerged revealed
a browning forest. I was surprised, says Goetz. We
looked at it a couple of times. In fact, we reprocessed
the data twice and then a third time to be sure. It was
no mistake; the forest was browning, but only in interior
Alaska and Canada. When we started to look at a
much larger area, we saw that the tundra areas
continued to green, where the forest areas were in
decline.
Dan Steinberg, a member of
Goetzs team, stands in a
boreal burn scar. Scott Goetz
and his colleagues first noticed
changes in the health of the
boreal forest while studying
burn scars. While burned areas
regrew as scientists expected,
growth slowed in the
surrounding unburned land.
(Photograph copyright Daniel
Steinberg, Woods Hole
Research Center.)
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But why were the forests in decline? Scientists have
always thought that plant growth in the boreal forests
was limited by temperature. Arctic summer provides a
brief period in which plants can thrive before the cold of
winter ends the growing season. If temperatures had
warmed, extending the growing season, then plants
should have been able to grow more. But Goetz and
his colleagues suspected that warmer temperatures
had also dried the forest.
Most people wouldnt think of these boreal forests as
being drought stressed, says Goetz. There is often a
lot of surface moisture in wet areas, but if the air is very
dry, conifers tend to be pretty strongly affected.
Photosynthetic rates are reduced when the air is dry,
particularly in these high-latitude forests adapted to
cooler conditions. Although drought would cause the
same kind of browning that Goetz and his colleagues
had observed, they werent certain that dryness was
the only thing affecting the trees. It was possible that
other factors, such as nutrient stress or insect damage,
could be to blame. Strong evidence that drought was
really to blame would come from a second source.
Warm Summers Slow Carbon Uptake
Forest on the Threshold
From 1982 through 2003, the
photosynthetic activity (an
indicator of plant growth) of the
boreal forest in North America
decreased. At the same time,
the photosynthetic activity of
tundra along the Arctic coast
increased. This map shows
areas of decreased
photosynthetic activity in brown,
and increased photosynthetic
activity in green. Despite
warmer temperatures and a
longer growing season, the
growth of the forest was
slowing down. (Map adapted
from Goetz et al. 2005.)