麻豆影院

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Deforestation impacts temperature and ecosystems says CU-麻豆影院 study
Feb. 23, 2016听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听 Kika Tuff听听听听听听听
Clearing forest impacts more than just the deforested area, according to new research from CU-麻豆影院.
That鈥檚 because the edges of deforested areas are highly susceptible to drastic temperature changes, leading to hotter, drier and more variable conditions for the forest acreage that remains, says Kika Tuff, lead author of the new paper.
CUT 1 鈥淵ou have these forests that are cool and moist and generate their own moisture through evapotranspiration and when you cut down these areas next to them, you create this really intense thermal contrast. (:14) So you have cool and moist next to hot and dry and that cool and moist air starts to be sucked out of the forest and run over the ground in these really hot and dry areas just because of thermal dynamics.鈥� (:27)
Tuff is a PhD candidate in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.
She says the thermo dynamics created by deforestation is altering the ecosystem in a number of ways, including the creation of micro-weather patterns.
CUT 2 鈥淣ot only do these hot spots of cleared areas suck the cool and moist air out, but if they do that enough they start to form their own rain clouds in the dry spot. (:13) So now it rains in the dry, hot spots. It doesn鈥檛 rain in the forest where it should just because moisture is being sucked into these areas. So you鈥檝e got not only hotter but dryer and now fully altered weather patterns that will perpetuate further drying.鈥� (:30)
She says the findings suggest that thermal biology鈥攁n emerging discipline that examines temperature variations and their ecological effects鈥攃ould be an effective tool for understanding how temperature changes in fragmented habitats can potentially wreak havoc on species activity and other critical ecosystem functions.
CUT 3 鈥淚n tropical forests we are the most concerned because you have organisms that are used to very thermally stable conditions. They are used to the same temperature all year round. So they develop these behaviors, thermal behaviors, that are really precise. (:18) 30.2 degrees Celsius is their optimum body temperature and they can handle a change of, like, 1 degree. And so now you come in and you increase it 10 degrees in a day for species that are the most sensitive and you have a serious problem.鈥� (:33)
Tuff says one impact to species living in the edge environment might be the timing and duration of species activity. As temperatures increase predators may start foraging later in the day to avoid the heat. Such a change could catch prey off guard, possibly resulting in localized species population crashes.
CUT 4 鈥淲ith some of the climate change literature we鈥檝e seen a prey species can start to become active later in the day and that can confound predation events because their predators were naturally active later in the day, which is why they foraged in the afternoon to begin with. (:16) So you have these time-disconnects that start to converge and now you get these predation events that are massive and take out a big chunk of the population.鈥� (:25)
A study outlining a framework for applying thermal biology to deforestation research was recently published in the journal Ecology Letters.
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