Paper Highlights Resilience and Recovery of Large, Old Trees

A brief synthesis of large, old tree dynamics, recently published by the journal Conservation Letters, shows that despite concerns of widespread declines of large trees, forest research from the USA, Sweden, European Union, and the tropics reveal that large trees have actually increased in many of the world’s forests in recent decades. The author of the article, Harvard Forest affiliate Ed Faison (from Highstead), explains that the upward trend is particularly notable in the eastern deciduous forest, where regrowth of forests after 19^th century land clearance has produced a five to six-fold increase in large tree volume over the past 60 years.