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"The boards that make our hut were cut from somewhere". I had hoped that consumption of wood for construction is one of the best things we can do assuming the t
by throwaway803453 5y ago
"The boards that make our hut were cut from somewhere". I had hoped that consumption of wood for construction is one of the best things we can do assuming the tree is mature and no longer growing and a new tree is planted in its place.
Unfortunately there is data that shows old trees are better carbon consumers than young trees which is surprising. I expected the carbon required for physical growth would be much higher than needed what is needed for its basal(?) metabolic rate once it is mature. But I missed the fact that most older trees are still growing.
https://www.pacificforest.org/ee-old-trees-store-more-carbon-more-quickly-than-younger-trees/ https://www.pacificforest.org/ee-old-trees-store-more-carbon...
- hcurtiss 5y agoPacificforest.org is not exactly a neutral source, and that's a pretty confusing article (are they talking about sequestering in plant material, or respiration?). In terms of annual growth (which is a decent proxy for the amount sequestered from the atmosphere), trees peak (the culmination of the periodic annual increment), and then every year sequester less than the year before. See page 3 here [1]. There's a reason they mention 90 years as that's approximately the culmination of mean annual increment (the highest average growth over a rotation) for PNW douglas fir forests, which is what Pacific Forest Trust principally focuses on. A very old forest reaches statis and stops sequestering carbon all together, and as we see in the intermountain west, they can become very large sources of emissions as you lose forests to stochastic events like fire.
- atatatat 5y agoAnd that they're much larger, and their "filters" are more mature than young trees.