Unknown to many people, trees in northwest Ohio's booming Oak Openings region appear to be 75 percent more efficient than most trees at removing the chief greenhouse gas that causes global warming.
The information, accepted for publication May 26 by the International Journal of Biometeorology, could wind up bolstering the argument for managing growth better in a globally rare, 22-mile-wide swath of land that is now facing intensive development pressures because of the Toledo-area's westward urban sprawl.
The region, which once spanned western Lucas County and parts of Henry, Fulton, and Monroe counties, already is the darling of Ohio's scientists, naturalists, and environmentalists.
The Oak Openings is a region where oak savannas and tall prairie grasses once met. It has more globally rare plants than any other region in Ohio. Its greatest wildlife symbol, the Karner blue butterfly, is the nation's first endangered butterfly to successfully be reintroduced to an area from which it had vanished. It is a birder's paradise, with more nesting songbirds than any other part of the state, including Ottawa County's famed marshes.
Now, University of Toledo researcher Jiquan Chen tells The Blade that data he has gathered the last two years, as part of a major U.S.-China science project, show that trees at the Oak Openings Preserve Metropark are veritable workhorses in removing carbon from the atmosphere.
Mr. Chen, a UT ecology professor, is chief scientist of the U.S.-China Carbon Consortium that has received millions of research dollars from the two countries.
Carbon dioxide, a smokestack pollutant that has one carbon molecule for every two oxygen molecules, is the chief greenhouse gas that causes global warming. It comes from coal-fired power plants, refineries, factories, and automobile exhaust.
Several countries are collectively spending billions of dollars trying to find ways of storing - or, as scientists say, sequestering - carbon indefinitely in hopes of one day slowing down or possibly even reversing global warming. Such scenarios likely would take decades.
One of the hottest research topics, involving Ohio's own FirstEnergy Corp. and Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, involves developing ways to inject carbon dioxide gases underground in abandoned mines, depleted oil fields, and other pits.
Another involves the carbon-absorption capacity of trees.
Both could be used to help determine how utilities and other industries could buy and sell emission credits, with their environmental improvements benchmarked against what they release into the air.
Trees vary in their carbon-absorption capacity, based on species, soil, latitude, age, and other factors. Those in the Oak Openings are probably more efficient than average because of the region's unique soil, as well as their relatively young and robust age. Many are white pines planted during the Depression under the former Works Progress Administration.
Despite their efficiency, Oak Openings is a tiny blip on the Earth's screen of trees. They certainly pale in comparison to the number of trees that have come down in tropical rain forests.
But Mr. Chen's preliminary results even took Toledo Area Metroparks officials by surprise Friday.
Both John Jaeger, the park district's natural resources chief, and Scott Carpenter, its spokesman, defended the district's move to thin out 1 percent of the trees from Oak Openings Preserve Metropark.
Their goal, funded by agencies such as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, is to reopen the forest floor so that more native plants, such as native wild lupine, can return and help re-establish the Karner blue butterfly. Wild lupine is that butterfly's only source of food.
Oak Openings is not historically such a heavily forested area. Its diversity was affected by the WPA decision to plant the pine trees, Mr. Jaeger has said.
But both he and Mr. Carpenter said Mr. Chen's research should help bolster the arguments against uncontrolled development.
"All the fingers of development are heading out west into the Oak Openings," Mr. Jaeger said.
Said Mr. Carpenter: "The work we're doing there affects 1 percent of the Oak Openings and is counterbalanced by the diversity it'll bring back to the Oak Openings. I think that says more about where we [as a society] choose to develop than where we [Metroparks] choose to do selective management."
Although the park district is thinning out only 1 percent of the trees from its largest Metropark, Mr. Jaeger said he wouldn't rule out a modification of that plan. He said he has "tremendous respect" for Mr. Chen.
Mr. Chen's research at Oak Openings cost about $1 million, including $780,000 from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Southern Global Change Program, $180,000 from the Ohio Board of Regents, and unspecified in-kind services from Metroparks for security and electricity.
It includes Ohio's first and only special tower for such research, called an eddy-flux tower. The 105-foot tower is tucked away in the Oak Openings park. It was 1 of 55 in the country when it was constructed in November, 2003. There are now 120 of them in the U.S., Mr. Chen said.
Real-time data are transmitted directly from that site and a satellite site at the park to the UT laboratory where Mr. Chen works. The setup became the research model for 28 other sites in the eastern United States. Similar research is being done in eastern China, Mr. Chen said.
Steady increases in the Earth's carbon dioxide levels have been documented since the late 1950s at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii.
North American trees are most active in reducing carbon during the summer, when foliage is out. Last year at the Oak Openings, a mere week-long day delay in the start of spring reduced the region's 2005 absorption by 20 percent over 2004, Mr. Chen said.Toledo Blade
