Amid the towering gums and timeless myrtles of Tasmania’s southern forests, scientists are deploying cutting-edge technology to unravel the mysteries of an ancient ecosystem and of future climate change. Source: The Australian
A World Heritage Area wet eucalypt forest in the Huon Valley has been set aside for a globally significant and extraordinary carbon-monitoring project.
An 80 metre steel tower has been erected in the middle of forest otherwise undisturbed by logging and last year added to the state’s Wilderness World Heritage area.
Attached to the tip of this “flux tower” is monitoring equipment that can detect fluctuations in the amount of carbon, water and energy between the land and the atmosphere, in real time.
Combined with old-fashioned ground work by taking soil samples, measuring trees and collecting bugs scientists hope the data will reveal how and when forests store and release carbon.
Armed with that information, the world can better manage its production forests and the southern hemisphere — a relative newcomer to this form of carbon monitoring — should achieve more accurate climate change predictions.
Tim Wardlaw, a principal scientist with Forestry Tasmania, said data from the site, which is one of 10 around the nation, covering a range of vegetation types, is beginning to shed light on how Australian forests react to extreme weather.
It was hoped the federal government funded research would reduce the reliance on use of northern hemisphere forest carbon data in climate change models for this part of the world.
“Different parts of Australia will have different vulnerabilities (to extreme weather), and we still don’t understand what they are,” Dr Wardlaw said.
“But we now have science across such a wide variety of these sites we can look at events such as the heatwave of last year and see how different ecosystems responded. With a more regionally adapted model, it’s hoped the predictions will be closer to reality.”
Trends are emerging from an analysis of the first 12 months of data from the flux tower at Forestry Tasmania’s 15,500 hectare Warra research property.
“The key discovery … is that on the hotter days the forests were taking in much less carbon from the atmosphere than on cooler days,” he said.
He expects the data will aid a more informed debate about whether it is better, from a carbon storage standpoint, to leave mature forests untouched or instead harvest and regrow them.
