Tropical storms often begin with an impressive display of pyrotechnics, but researchers have largely overlooked the role of lightning strikes in tropical ecosystems.
Tropical storms often begin with an impressive display of pyrotechnics, but researchers have largely overlooked the role of lightning strikes in tropical ecosystems.
Researchers at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama have published dramatic maps showing the locations of lightning strikes across the tropics in Global Change Biology. Based on ground and satellite data, they estimate that more than 100 million lighting strikes on land each year will radically alter forests and other ecosystems in the region between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn.
“Lightning influences the ability of forests to store biomass, and therefore carbon, because it tends to strike the largest trees,” said Evan Gora, a post-doctoral fellow at STRI who recently finished his doctorate at the University of Louisville. “And lightning strikes may also be very important in savanna ecosystems.”
Because lightning is so challenging to study, it has been overlooked as a change-agent in tropical forests where researchers focus their energy on more obvious disturbances like drought, fire, and high winds.
Read more at Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute
Photo Credit: sethink via Pixabay
