And yet this extra growth all around because of co2 means that the will be more co2? This seems incoherent.
Pet peeve - if the article hooks you with a line like 'visible from space' they should provide the imagery so I can see for myself. But there's no picture.
>Lianas are rapidly expanding their territory in tropical forests, sometimes suppressing tree growth entirely in certain locations. In such areas, forest regeneration halts, and carbon storage can decline by as much as 95%. "That's almost equivalent to deforestation," Visser says.
There's more more CO₂ in the atmosphere; so more lianas grow; they choke out the main tree body; so less CO₂ is absorbed; so there's more CO₂ in the atmosphere, _e.t.c._
[0]https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.13...
The original research just says "Global increase of lianas in tropical forests", the addition of "from space" is to get clicks here.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.17485
That's the better link to use for this anyway. It's open access so no reason not to go to the source.
It appears to be heavily statistical and based on scraping many studies for a meta analysis.
"Our meta-analysis resulted in 505 effect sizes (ES) extracted from 39 unique studies (Figure 2). An initial exploratory analysis following the vote counting approach showed a general trend of increasing liana prevalence throughout the tropics is evinced by 333 positive ES (66%) compared to 172 ES (34%) with decreasing or stable trends. After grouping ES per life stage and aggregating the results reported at the species level, 155 ES and their respective standard errors (SE) were obtained. The general increasing pattern and its geographical coverage hold for the reduced dataset, with 112 ES (72%) showing an increasing trend."
But for CO2. Guess they didn't spell it out. If the Lianas kill the tree, and the Lianas absorb less CO2 than a tree, then even though there is an increase in Liana growth, there is also less tree growth, so net less CO2 absorbed.
A quick check from the referenced papers only mention a 2008 dataset from Landsat in a meta analysis. And no fancy pictures to look at.
If trees die (because of the lianas) faster than they grow, it's not impossible at all.
Nature generally balances itself (with more CO2 getting balanced by more plant growth) on the long term, not necessarily on the short term.
There is no picture because they are not visible from space. They are refering to a model that estimate their presence from satellite images. Which is not what people understand by "visible".
It's not. Atmospheric CO2 increases as a result of processes external and unrelated to these forests. There's no suggestion or reason to think that plant growth would or could counteract that trend.
> Pet peeve - if the article hooks you with a line like 'visible from space' they should provide the imagery so I can see for myself. But there's no picture.
It would be nice, but I suspect it's missing for the same reason imagery is missing from so many astronomical articles, too: there aren't any images, because the findings are numerical and statistical, not visual.
The detection process that the article describes certainly sounds as thought it wouldn't be visible. To make the findings visible to readers of this article, the researcher would need to build it from effect, addin false color to an image to make it visible. And even then the differences may be too miniscule to be visible to the naked eye without considerable additional manipulation.
Those images likely don't exist, and creating them would be a lot of work for a probably small team of researchers who don't have a lot of extra labor or spare money.
Stand scale (900-m2 scale) data used satellite imagery from previous studies to contrast liana-infested and liana-sparse forest patches in Bolivia and French Guiana. In both cases, we obtained the original images used, which included a 30-m resolution Landsat Thematic Mapper (L1TP) image (French Guiana) and hyperspectral Hyperion imagery from NASA's EO-1 satellite (Bolivia).