About TreeMort

What’s the likelihood that a tree will die in a given year? How does this vary across the world? What are the causes of this? How might this change in the future? TreeMort is about improving our understanding of tree mortality across the globe.

So far the team has discovered…

Large-scale events such as fires, storms and clearcut harvests are behind about 12% of the total tree biomass dying each year.

Young forest stands recovering from past disturbances are a major contributor to the global carbon sink, but that this sink is currently concentrated in extra-tropical forests.

A combination of past human management and the growing impacts of climate have led to an on-going trend for the world’s forests to become, on average, progressively younger.

More news can be found on our Project Updates page.

One core project aim is to provide datasets that can support model-based assessments of the terrestrial carbon cycle. A global disturbance rate dataset that can be applied in vegetation models can be downloaded here.

Links to more datasets from the project can be found on our Datasets page.

For regular updates, follow us on Twitter at @TreeMort_ERC