PRESS-NEWS.org - Press Release Distribution
PRESS RELEASES DISTRIBUTION

Forests can’t keep up: Adaptation will lag behind climate change

2025-07-03
(Press-News.org) Ecologists are concerned that forest ecosystems will not keep pace with a rapidly changing climate, failing to remain healthy and productive. Before the rapid climate change of the past century, tree populations in the Northern Hemisphere adapted to colder and warmer periods over thousands of years. During onsets of Ice Ages, tree populations migrated south, seeking warmer conditions as global temperatures cooled, their seeds dispersed by winds and carried by animals. When the climate warmed again, tree species adapted by migrating north to more suitable conditions. Mature trees are long-lived, and their populations can’t migrate quickly. Current climate change is happening faster than many forests can adapt and thrive, creating a mismatch between the pace of warming and forests’ natural adaptation.

A new study in the journal Science shows that forests have a lag time of one to two centuries to shift tree populations in response to climate changes, according to first author David Fastovich, a postdoctoral researcher at Syracuse University in the Paleoclimate Dynamics Lab of Tripti Bhattacharya, Thonis Family Professor of Paleoclimate Dynamics and associate professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences.

The research team set out to map the timescales at which tree populations respond to climate change, examining pollen data from lake sediment cores spanning up to 600,000 years ago.

“We’ve known these time lags have existed, but no one could put a firm number on them,” says Fastovich. “We can intuit how long a tree lives. We can count the rings on a tree and estimate from there. But now we know that after one to two centuries—very close to how long a tree lives on average—entire forest ecosystems begin to turnover as trees die and are replaced in response to climate.”  

The research team used spectral analysis—a statistical technique common in fields such as physics and engineering—to study long-term ecological data. This method allowed the researchers to compare the relationship between tree populations and climate from decades to millennia. One goal was to learn how closely tree population migrations, tree mortality and forest disturbances from things like forest fires match climate changes over time.

Spectral analysis provides a newly unified statistical approach that connects how natural forest adaptation evolves from days to thousands of years.

“This gives us a common language for people who observe forest change—ecologists, paleoecologists and paleobiologists—to talk to one another about those changes no matter if we study forests on annual or millennial timescales,” Fastovich says.

The researchers found that at timescales of years and decades, forests typically change slowly. After about eight centuries, though, forest changes tend to become larger, tied to natural climate variability.

“With this new technique, we can think about ecological processes on any timescale and how they are connected,” says Fastovich. “We can understand how dispersal and population changes interact and cause a forest to change from decades to centuries, and even longer timescales. That hasn’t been done before.”

The study also suggests that forests will need more human intervention to keep them healthy. Assisted migration might be an effective tool. It is the practice of planting warmer-climate trees in traditionally colder locations to help woodlands adapt and flourish despite the heating of their habitats from climate change. Forest adaptation to climate will be a slow, complex process requiring nuanced, long-term management strategies, Fastovich notes.

“There’s a mismatch between the timescales at which forests naturally change to what’s happening today with climate change,” Fastovich says. “Population-level changes aren’t going to be fast enough to keep the forests that we care about around. Assisted migration is one tool of many to keep cherished forests around for longer.”

END


ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

Sturgeon reintroduction initiative yields promising first-year survival rate

2025-07-03
Ecologists celebrated the release of thousands of palm-sized lake sturgeon into northwest Ohio's Maumee River in 2018, kicking off an ambitious two-decade plan to re-establish the ancient species in the waters it once called home. More than five years later, it’s still too soon to declare success. But early signs are promising, according to recent research led by The University of Toledo and published in the peer-reviewed North American Journal of Fisheries Management. The research tracked the first-year survival rates for cohorts released in 2018, 2019 and 2021, with results suggesting that the initiative is on track to achieve its goal of a self-sustaining ...

Study: Babies’ poor vision may help organize visual brain pathways

2025-07-03
CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Incoming information from the retina is channeled into two pathways in the brain’s visual system: one that’s responsible for processing color and fine spatial detail, and another that’s involved in spatial localization and detecting high temporal frequencies. A new study from MIT provides an account for how these two pathways may be shaped by developmental factors. Newborns typically have poor visual acuity and poor color vision because their retinal cone cells are not well-developed at birth. This means that early in life, they are seeing blurry, color-reduced imagery. The MIT team proposes that such blurry, color-limited ...

Research reveals Arctic region was permafrost-free when global temperatures were 4.5˚ C higher than today

2025-07-03
Scientists have found evidence that the Asian continent was free of permafrost all the way to its northerly coast with the Arctic Ocean when Earth’s average temperature was 4.5˚C warmer than today, suggesting that the whole Northern Hemisphere would have also been free of permafrost at the time. The stark findings indicate that if average global temperatures were to rise by this amount in the future, permafrost found in the Northern Hemisphere today would thaw. Such a temperature increase would release up to 130 billion tonnes of carbon currently frozen in the ground over the coming decades. The ...

Novel insights into chromophobe renal cell carcinoma biology and potential therapeutic strategies

2025-07-03
New Haven, Conn. — Cancer fighting T-cells, the immune system’s primary enforcers, are scarce in the rare kidney cancer called chromophobe renal cell carcinoma (ChRCC) and those that are present are indifferent to the tumor threat and traditional immune therapies, revealing the need for new targets and treatments.   Those are among the results described in a July 2 published report in the Journal of Clinical Oncology that set out to understand the biology of certain kidney tumors, including ChRCC, and their immune responses.   The study found that ChRCC, which accounts ...

A breakthrough in motor safety: AI-powered warning system enhances capability to uncover hidden winding faults

2025-07-03
Enhanced diagnostic method of the ITSC fault The study, led by Dr. Wentao Huang, overcame a critical gap in five-phase permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) diagnostics: conventional methods fail to assess inter-turn short-circuit (ITSC) severity. The method integrates two technologies: a real-time tracker that diagnoses faults, and an AI analyzer that processes signals to quantify damage while estimating short-circuit parameters. Overcoming the Blind Spot For years, the challenge of quantifying inter-turn short-circuit severity in operating motors has stumped engineers, as traditional methods struggled ...

Research teases apart competing transcription organization models

2025-07-03
Scientists at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital have reconciled two closely related but contentious mechanisms underlying transcription, the process of converting genetic information in DNA into messenger RNA. Phase separation has been proposed as a driving force in transcription due to its ability to selectively concentrate proteins and DNA in discrete droplets. However, scientists have been unclear about what really matters for transcription: the phase-separated droplets or the molecular interactions that contribute to phase separation by forming networks.     To address ...

Connect or reject: Extensive rewiring builds binocular vision in the brain

2025-07-03
Scientists have long known that the brain’s visual system isn’t fully hardwired from the start—it becomes refined by what babies see—but the authors of a new MIT study still weren’t prepared for the degree of rewiring they observed when they took a first-ever look at the process in mice as it happened in real-time. As the researchers in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory tracked hundreds of “spine” structures housing individual network connections, or “synapses,” on the dendrite branches of neurons in the visual cortex over 10 days, they saw that only 40 percent of the ...

Benefits and risks: informal use of antibiotics to prevent sexually transmitted infections on the rise in key populations in the Netherlands

2025-07-03
New research analysing an online survey of 1,633 respondents found 15% recent use of doxycycline post- and pre-exposure prophylaxis (doxyPEP/PrEP) among men who have sex with men (MSM), transgender and gender diverse people in the Netherlands according to a recent study published by Eurosurveillance [1]. These data highlight an increase in the informal use of doxyPEP/PrEP, with 65% of the participants intending to use it in the future. Currently, doxyPEP/PrEP is not recommended or actively promoted by healthcare professionals in the Netherlands. Informal ...

New molecular tool sheds light on how cancer cells repair telomeres

2025-07-03
Each time a cell divides, a small section of each chromosome’s protective cap — the telomere — is worn away. Most cells use an enzyme called telomerase to help mitigate this loss, but 10% to 15% of cancers have another mechanism called the alternative lengthening of telomeres (ALT) pathway. “ALT is found in some of the worst cancers, such as pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors, osteosarcomas and subsets of glioma,” said Roderick O’Sullivan, Ph.D., professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Chemical Biology at the University of Pittsburgh and UPMC Hillman Cancer Center. “Interfering with ALT in these cancers ...

First large-scale stem cell bank enables worldwide studies on genetic risk for Alzheimer’s disease

2025-07-03
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a common, debilitating neurodegenerative disease affecting about 10 percent of people over the age of 65 and one third of people aged 85 and above. Besides environmental factors, the genes have a strong influence on whether or not a person develops AD during their lifetime. Through genome sequencing of DNA from large groups of healthy people and people with AD, some naturally occurring small changes in the DNA, known as genetic variants, were found to be more frequent in AD patients than in healthy people. As more and more of these AD-associated genetic “risk” variants are discovered, ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

CMD-OPT model enables the discovery of a potent and selective RIPK2 inhibitor as preclinical candidate for the treatment of acute liver injury

Melatonin receptor 1a alleviates sleep fragmentation-aggravated testicular injury in T2DM by suppression of TAB1/TAK1 complex through FGFR1

Single-cell RNA sequencing reveals Shen-Bai-Jie-Du decoction retards colorectal tumorigenesis by regulating the TMEM131–TNF signaling pathway-mediated differentiation of immunosuppressive dendritic ce

Acta Pharmaceutica Sinica B Volume 15, Issue 7 Publishes

New research expands laser technology

Targeted radiation offers promise in patients with metastasized small cell lung cancer to the brain

A high clinically translatable strategy to anti-aging using hyaluronic acid and silk fibroin co-crosslinked hydrogels as dermal regenerative fillers

Mount Sinai researchers uncover differences in how males and females change their mind when reflecting on past mistakes

CTE and normal aging are difficult to distinguish, new study finds

Molecular arms race: How the genome defends itself against internal enemies

Tiny chip speeds up antibody mapping for faster vaccine design

KTU experts reveal why cultural heritage is important for community unity

More misfolded proteins than previously known may contribute to Alzheimer’s and dementia

“Too much going on”: Autistic adults overwhelmed by non-verbal social cues

What’s driving America’s deep freezes in a warming world?

A key role of brain protein in learning and memory is deciphered by scientists

Heart attacks don’t follow a Hollywood script

Erin M. Schuman wins 2026 Nakasone Award for discovery on neural synapse function and change during formation of memories

Global ocean analysis could replace costly in-situ sound speed profiles in seafloor positioning, study finds

Power in numbers: Small group professional coaching reduces rates of physician burnout by nearly 30%

Carbon capture, utilization, and storage: A comprehensive review of CCUS-EOR

New high-temperature stable dispersed particle gel for enhanced profile control in CCUS applications

State gun laws and firearm-related homicides and suicides

Use of tobacco and cannabis following state-level cannabis legalization

Long-term obesity and biological aging in young adults

Eindhoven University of Technology and JMIR Publications announce unlimited open access publishing agreement

Orphan nuclear receptors in metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease development

A technological breakthrough for ultra-fast and greener AI

Pusan National University researchers identify key barriers hindering data-driven smart manufacturing adoption

Inking heterometallic nanosheets: A scalable breakthrough for coating, electronics, and electrocatalyst applications

[Press-News.org] Forests can’t keep up: Adaptation will lag behind climate change