Scientists Studying Earth’s Trees Issue a Bleak Warning to Humanity

Pelican Press · October 9, 2024

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Scientists Studying Earth’s Trees Issue a Bleak Warning to Humanity

From soaring coastal redwoods to

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and

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that make the perfect

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, even our most revered woody plants are in an awful lot of trouble.

But it turns out that losing some species won’t just endanger local forests; it will threaten entire ecosystems, research shows.

In 2021, a

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found a shocking one-third of all tree species are currently teetering on the edge of existence.

This amounts to about 17,500 unique tree species that are endangered.

That’s more than

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(mammals, birds, amphibians, and reptiles).

Some trees are so rare that

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, like the lonesome palm in Mauritius,

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.

In a

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, the same researchers issued a “warning to humanity” about the consequences of these losses, backed by 45 other scientists from 20 different countries.

Conservation biologist Malin Rivers from Botanic Gardens Conservation International and colleagues outline the many impacts these losses will have on our economies, livelihoods, and food.

Most of our fruit comes from trees, as do many nuts and medicines, with non-timber products amounting to

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.

In the developing world, 880 million people rely on firewood for fuel, and 1.6 billion people live within 5 kilometers (3 miles) of a forest, relying on them for food and income.

All up, trees contribute about US$1.3 trillion annually to the global economy, yet we’re destroying billions of them every year –

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for farming and development.

Trees are each their own little worlds, teeming with all sorts of single- and multicellular-life forms, including other plants, fungi, bacteria, and animals. Lose a tree, and this entire world ***** too. They often form the supportive base for the

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.

In fact, half of all the world’s animals and plants

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.

“Habitat loss is frequently tree loss, it is at the root of that when we look at extinction concerns for animals or birds,” Rivers

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Nature World News in 2022.

“There is no way we can take care of all the other creatures there if we don’t take care of the trees.”

As with all living systems, losing diversity makes the

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more vulnerable.

This is because less variation means less diversity in immune response, in genes, and responses to environmental conditions, meaning lower chances of surviving the many threats battering the complex web of interactions that is life on Earth.

Some tree species provide unique interactions and can’t be replaced by other species.

This includes the distinctive dragonsblood trees (

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), leftover from the ancient

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woodlands, which are host to many other species that are entirely dependent on them, including

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and the

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.

So the extinction of a single species can cause a massive domino effect across everything else that interacts with it,

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.

Species that rely on our dwindling forests have already declined by around

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, and more

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are showing signs of increasing stress.

This doesn’t just impact the other life trees interact with either.

Trees are interwoven with Earth’s soil, atmosphere, and weather, too – cleaning our air, producing oxygen, and

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. They store three-quarters of the world’s accessible freshwater and

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.

Lose enough trees and our planet’s cycling of carbon, water, and nutrients will be thrown into disarray.

“We’re showing that diverse forests store more carbon than monocultures,” Rivers

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The Guardian.

“That’s true for many ecological functions, not just carbon capture, but providing habitat to animals, soil stabilization, resilience to pests and *********, resilience to storms and adverse weather. By losing tree diversity, we’ll also lose diversity in all organisms: birds, animals, fungi, microorganisms, insects.”

A few tree species are getting lucky and are able to take advantage of the rapid environmental changes we’ve caused, like those

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. But many more are being obliterated

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.

Much needs to be done to combat this at a collective level, but we all can play a part by recognizing the importance of trees and fighting our own

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. In 2022, researchers pointed out that

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are taking up botanical education in the *** at a time when

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more than ever.

We must all think of the trees.

The research was published in

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.

An earlier version of this article was published in September 2022.

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