Swiss-led study unravels tree growth and longevity
Trees reach old age using different strategies. This has been shown by a Swiss-led research team with over 100 scientists from all over the world in a new study for which they analysed trees that live to be over three thousand years old.
Lalasia Bialic-Murphy from ETH Zurich told the Keystone-SDA news agency that the large-scale study provided valuable insights. She is the lead author of the study, which was published on Thursday evening in the journal “ScienceExternal link“.
“Although trees are among the longest-living organisms on Earth, we don’t know much about their life cycle,” said the researcher. “Surprisingly, the oldest trees in tropical forests live just as long as the oldest trees in boreal forests in Canada,” said Bialic-Murphy.
Until now, it was assumed that fast-growing trees have a short life expectancy and slow-growing trees have a long life expectancy. The researchers have now been able to show that not all trees follow this pattern.
Adapted from German by DeepL/ac
This news story has been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team. At SWI swissinfo.ch we select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools such as DeepL to translate it into English. Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles.
If you want to know more about how we work, have a look here, if you want to learn more about how we use technology, click here, and if you have feedback on this news story please write to english@swissinfo.ch.
In compliance with the JTI standards
More: SWI swissinfo.ch certified by the Journalism Trust Initiative
You can find an overview of ongoing debates with our journalists here . Please join us!
If you want to start a conversation about a topic raised in this article or want to report factual errors, email us at english@swissinfo.ch.