Texas drought killed up to half a billion trees in 2011

10% of the state’s trees

Jay Blazek Crossley, Jan 04, 12.

Up to five hundred million trees died in Texas in 2011 due to the worst drought in recorded history, not counting those lost to wildfires, according to estimates from the Texas Forest Service, as reported in Texas Climate News.

The report notes that three mulit-county areas seemed particularly hit by the drought, “including Harris, Montgomery, Grimes, Madison and Leon counties [that] saw extensive mortality among loblolly pines.”

Texas state climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon sees another year of drought for 2012 as likely and says that “about a tenth of the excess heat this past summer was attributable to manmade climate change,” according to Texas Climate News, who connected the drought to a new study from NASA:

What the warming average temperature of the planet could mean for forests and other ecosystems was the focus of research findings announced last week by NASA.

The study, carried out by researchers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology, used a computer model that projected massive changes in plant communities across nearly half of the earth’s land surface, with “the conversion of nearly 40 percent of land-based ecosystems from one major ecological community type – such as forest, grassland or tundra – toward another.”