Thinking about what could lie ahead when climate-induced storms the strength of Hurricane Maria—the deadliest storm to hit Puerto Rico in almost a century—strike again keeps Maria Uriarte up at night.
Thinking about what could lie ahead when climate-induced storms the strength of Hurricane Maria—the deadliest storm to hit Puerto Rico in almost a century—strike again keeps Maria Uriarte up at night.
“We have to prepare to minimize the damage of increasingly severe weather,” said Uriarte, a professor in Columbia’s Department of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology. “Two years ago, Hurricane Maria destroyed thousands of acres of rainforests in Puerto Rico. But not all species were damaged. There were winners and losers—those that were resistant to storms and others that were not.”
Uriarte, who has been studying Puerto Rico’s trees for 15 years, said new tools are needed to predict the impact of a warming climate on forests. Not only do trees provide physical barriers against severe weather, they remove large amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, incorporating it through photosynthesis into their tissues as they grow.
“The challenge is to determine what impact past severe weather patterns have had on hurricane-resilient species,” Uriarte said. “Then we can focus on minimizing potential increases in carbon emissions, the major greenhouse gas linked to global warming.”
Read more at: Columbia University
Maria Uriarte, left, and Tian Zheng bring ecology and data research together to mitigate the effects of climate change. (Photo Credit: Bruce Gilbert)
