Swiss-led study unravels tree growth and longevity

Trees can live for thousands of years Keystone-SDA

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

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