Study: Old trees keep growing — in girth
By Richard Harris, NPR
Like other animals and many living things, we humans grow when we’re young and then stop growing once we mature. But trees, it turns out, are an exception to this general rule. In fact, scientists have discovered that trees grow faster the older they get.
Once trees reach a certain height, they do stop getting taller. So many foresters figured that tree growth — and girth — also slowed with age.
“What we found was the exact opposite,” says Nate Stephenson, a forest ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, based in California’s Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks. “Tree growth rate increases continuously as trees get bigger and bigger,” Stephenson says.
The General Sherman, a giant sequoia in California’s Sequoia National Park, is more than 2,000 years old, and is thought to be the largest tree (by volume) in the world.
Thanks for adding this article to the reportoire; it give additional credence as well to the idea of the value of “old growth” – a term used mostly these days in measurement of its’ girth (i.e., “30 inch DBH”) than as a way to also gauge it’s value to the ecosystem underneath and surrounding all larger trees. . .”old growth” is way more than its’ ‘girh’, as multiple habitats at various levels, the organisms in the soil, all come to develop the forest it’s in, not to mention the larger capacity for the tree’s absorbption of CO2 as the best treatment of “GHG emissions” – as the best carbon sink we have. . .that’s the danger of so much deforestation. . .long live the Giants !!. . .