American Trees Are Moving West

I wonder what affect 30+ years of "free tree" programs that various states and environmental clubs run for arbor day and such has had. Growing up in the midwest/great plains, ever year in elementary school we were given trees to take home and plant for arbor day. Little sticks, maybe a foot long with a small handful of roots, wrapped in damp paper towels to survive the trip home.

Someone says "oh, white oaks grow alright across the entire state, and their acorns are a good food source for the local wildlife" and they send out a few thousand of them for arbor day via elementary schools.

Some of them even survive. 30+ years later, those trees have dropped millions of acorns, most of which feed squirrels and deer or rot away, but some turn into trees.

Rinse and repeat every year. Seems like you could, over the course of nearly 40 years, unintentionally shift the population of a tree species.

The "no one knows why" seems to be a stretch. It mentions in the article that western areas are less moist and moisture levels have been increasing. Seems like they're pretty confident that's the reason.

What really should interest/worry you about this is the ecological changes that will follow.

Different animals and birds have special relationships with certain types of trees. When forests change, animals change. This can have a compounding effect, as animal changes can change forests in turn. A few small changes here and there can be the catalyst for much larger changes over time.

Doesn't say how much of this is due to new trees on the leading edge compared to less trees on the other end. In the analogy of a line of people, adding people to one end will move center that way as long as you don't add more to the other. The trees could grow each way or shrink each way and still show a movement, as long as one side is doing so at a different rate.

Higher atmospheric CO2 levels allow plants to survive in lower precipitation environments.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/07/130708103521.h...

Why not? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NZ04BG7TfA

Can you blame them? Look at how people vote East of the Pacific coast states. It's disgusting. If I were a tree, I'd move immediately.

Trees have been around for a very long time, hundreds of millions of years. Much longer than we have been. Possibly something they "know" at a genetic level is a sort of risk assessment where species are calculating better long term odds for the species based on local trend. They could be migrating toward areas where less adaptation is needed to survive; or maybe even a substantial but available path to adaptation via recessive genes.

This migration isn't the first. They've been doing this all along.

My first thought upon looking at the map: they're moving away from the coastline.

what the hell does "only explains at least 20%" mean?

We know why. It's climate change. It says so in the freakin' article!

r/savedyouaclick

Harumph.