Science Chat #12 | Forests and Rain with Douglas Sheil

Forests and trees influence water availability and with more than half of the world’s population suffering from water scarcity, these ecosystems are essential to protect. Douglas Sheil from NMBU’s Faculty of Environmental Sciences and Natural Resource Management brought to light new research which suggests that forests have much greater value than previously realized, such as maintaining global rainfall patterns.

Want to read up on the science? Here are some papers;

Forests, atmospheric water and an uncertain future: the new biology of the global water cycle (D. Sheil, 2018)

Intermediate tree cover can maximize groundwater recharge in the seasonally dry tropics (U. Ilstedt et al., 2016)