Climate Change Could Mean Less Maple Syrup For Your Pancakes
Maple syrup might be ubiquitous in pantries and pancake houses now, but new research suggests that might not always be the case. Climate change could eventually render the sticky stuff extinct.
A study published last month in the journal Ecology examined assessed how environmental conditions impacted the growth of more than 1,000 sugar maple trees at four forest sites in Michigan between 1994 and 2013. The findings were sobering: Climate change has led to warmer, drier growing seasons, stunting the growth of sugar maples.
Lead researcher Inés Ibáñez, ecology professor at the University of Michigan, used climate modeling to forecast the fate of sugar maples if nothing is done to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
"The biggest trees will still be there, but won't be growing as much and the little saplings won't survive, [so] once the older trees start dying, there will be no new trees to replace them," she says.
