Clemson researchers inspect hurricane tree damage

From an airplane, researchers from Clemson and Harvard saw miles of forest trees that looked like matchsticks after a category 5 hurricane.  But they when they got into the forests on the West Indies island of Dominica they were surprised that the category 5 killed only 10% of the damaged trees.  Many of the trees had respouted nine months after the September 2017 hurricane. Saara DeWalt of Clemson’s Department of Biological Sciences said, “I don’t want to minimize the scale of damage that these forests received – it was immense – but the fact that 90% of the trees survived shows an impressive level of resistance.”  With climate change, according to Clemson, hurricanes are increasing in frequency and severity.  Many regions of the world experiencing frequent hurricane disturbance also play particularly important roles in carbon, water and nutrient cycling and are global “hotspots” of diversity.