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magnificent trees face can be attributed to global warming, not all of it's threats are
caused by it.
"Big trees are among the oldest and largest of all living organisms and store much of
a forest's carbon, locking it up safely rather than releasing it as heat-trapping greenhouses gases.
Big trees, like Australia's mountain ash, manna gum, kauri pine and giant strangler fig, were of
course felled in great numbers in earlier land clearing and timber-cutting, but that is just part of
the story.
Even more insidious are a range of other threats - habitat fragmentation, droughts, windstorms, aggressive weeds, altered fire regimes, salinisation, a decline of their animal seed dispersers,
and exotic pathogens and pests.
It has been revealed in the Northern Territory that gamba grass, an aggressive weed species from Africa, is overrunning many savanna woodlands.
Another exotic weed, lantana, plagues seasonal rainforests and almost completely
halt the growth and survival of tree seedlings.
Even more worrying is the death of adult giant trees.
Habitat fragmentation kills many adult trees.
Other threats to Australia's big trees abound: die-back caused by the Phytophthora fungus is
killing big trees in many parts of the country; the Sirex wood wasp, native to Eurasia and North America, has destroyed millions of trees in South Australia and Tasmania; and salinisation
of soils is killing many others.
Droughts are also a serious worry.
The decline of big trees foretells a different world - one where forests shrink and store less carbon, where fewer tree-dependent animals survive, where giant cathedral-like canopies and the diverse ecosystems that rely on them to live become a thing of the past."
http://www.australia...f-big-trees.htm
Like the assault that bees are facing, from many fronts, so are these trees.
