Lakehead project studying forest drought earns provincial grant

A Lakehead University research project studying how climate change-induced drought affects conifer pine trees will receive $60,000 over the next four years from the Ontario government’s Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR).

The project is headed by Dr. Qing-Lai Dang, a Lakehead Professor in the Faculty of Natural Resources Management.

As climate change makes droughts more frequent and severe, Dang hopes understand the stress mechanisms which cause Ontario’s conifer pines to die.

“What we do not know is how dry is too dry for the trees, and how much the drought actually reduces their growth and productivity,” Dang explains.

The research project will also provide information to the MNR to help the body update its forestry management guidelines, with future-proofed policies that account for climate change.

Through studying how pine trees die from drought, Dang also hopes to make forests more resilient.

In drought, trees tend to die either from “carbon starvation” or “hydraulic failure”.

Dang hopes to determine which tree species are dying from which mechanism.

“That mechanism of identification can be used by tree breeders to breed trees for the future that will be more drought resilient,” he says.

The professor believes his research has environmental and economic implications.

Drought will hurt forestry industries and the communities which rely on them, and diminish the biodiversity of forest ecosystems.

In addition to the provincial grant, the project is also receiving $120,000 from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

The grant money will help the project pay for graduate and postdoctoral students to assist with research.

Dang says the focus of his research for more than two decades has been to understand how boreal forests will respond to climate change, to see “what kind of forests we will have by the end of the century.”