Trees Pass Gas - The Wind in the Willows
Last updated: 3 Jul, 2013
Fascinating paper published in the January 2013 – 197(2) – issue of New Phytologist exploring tree methane emissions. The study by researchers at The Open University and the Universities of Bristol and Oxford, provides a new understanding about sources of methane from tropical ecosystems.
Lead researcher Dr Vincent Gauci of The Open University said "This work challenges our previous understanding of how these ecosystems exchange methane with the atmosphere and adds another piece to the tropical methane emission puzzle. It further shows that for wet tropical forested ecosystems, the like of which span south America, Africa and southeast Asia, researchers may have been missing most of the methane emitted from these ecosystems if they neglected to measure tree stem emissions.”