Diverse forests can better withstand extreme weather events, study finds. Here’s why

Forests around the world face mounting pressures as the climate changes. In order to understand how they will fare, new research suggests looking at the forest for the trees — more specifically, the different types of trees within. The study, published in July in Nature Communications, examined thousands of acres of U.S. woodlands. It found that the higher diversity of tree species in a forest, the better equipped it will be to handle the compound climate extremes that result from global warming, such as when extreme heat occurs at the same time as drought or unusually high rainfall. Previous research had already shown that diversity among tree species, broadly, made forests stronger. But most of this research had been smaller in scale, or on human-planted experimental plots. Confirming that diversity does indeed have a positive effect on the vast, complicated systems of natural forests somewhat surprised the paper’s lead author, Xuetao Qiao. “Before completing the analyses, we were genuinely uncertain whether we would be able to detect this relationship in real forests,” wrote Qiao, a postdoctoral researcher in ecology at Peking University in China, in an email to Mongabay. A mixture of five tree species at the Sardinilla plot in Panama, planted as part of the Tree Diversity Network. The plot reached 25 years in 2026, making it the oldest tropical tree diversity experiment, according to researchers. Image by Florian Schnabel. Additionally, most research into forests’ climate resilience has focused on how they weather single events, such as heat waves.…This article was originally published on

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