Forest Thinning and Snowpack

What they found was remarkable. Over a single winter, this targeted thinning increased snowpack by 30% on north-facing slopes and 16% on south-facing slopes. That additional snow amounted to about 12.3 acre-feet of water—around 4 million gallons—per 100 acres on the cooler, north-facing slopes, and 5.1 acre-feet (about 1.5 million gallons) per 100 acres on the sunnier, south-facing slopes. Forest Thinning and Snowpack Not a surprise. It was my first thought as I read the headline. During the record-breaking El Niño event, which brought the most severe drought ever recorded in the Amazon basin, the rainforest’s trees underwent a remarkable chemical adaptation to cope with extreme heat and water scarcity. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, using high-precision measurements from an 80-meter tower in the central Amazon, observed that emissions of sesquiterpenes surged by 122 percent throughout the drought period, while levels of the more common isoprene and…