Uprooted trees as record for extreme wind events
Quoting Jonathan Hines in IU News: ""Take a walk in the woods in southern Indiana and you’ll likely come across an uprooted tree, its displaced roots rising above a pit of soil on the hillslopes."
A new study by Indiana University researchers shows that this easily overlooked sight can play a surprisingly useful role for science, serving as a physical record for extreme wind events that are notoriously difficult to measure. By studying high-resolution maps of the forest floor, IU researchers developed a model linking hillslope bumpiness to the frequency of extreme wind, providing new insight into how wind affects forest evolution and how often extreme wind events occur in the area.
“When strong winds cause trees to uproot, they leave a recognizable signature on the forest floor,” said Tyler Doane, a former IU postdoctoral researcher who led the study. “In southern Indiana, we found that the disturbances left by these trees can serve as a reliable proxy for windstorms that occurred over the last decades to centuries.” "