Maple syrup could be a new victim of climate change

Maple syrup pancakes

Image - Viajejet.com

If you love maple syrup, also known as maple syrup, and enjoy putting it, for example, on pancakes for breakfast… I have bad news for you. Well, not me, but a study published in the journal Ecology.

And, the trees from which the sap is extracted to make it may not see the birth of the new century due to rising temperatures.

Maples are deciduous trees native to temperate regions of the world. We find the vast majority of species in the Old Continent, but there are also many in America, such as the Acer rubrum. In Spain we have Acer campestris, Acer platanoides or acer opalus, among others. All of them, regardless of where they are, They are plants that like temperate climates, with mild summers (no more than 30ºC) and winters with frosts (below 10 degrees below zero).

When the global mean temperature rises, it affects all maples equally, including the species that are used to make syrup, since they can die (and in fact, they usually do so quickly) when conditions become unfavorable; that is, when the temperature is higher than it should and it stops raining as often as it should.

Acer saccharum, the sugar tree

This is something that the study authors have been able to verify. In it you can see two models: in the first, the variation of the global average temperature is only one degree above the current one and there is no variation in rainfall; in the second, the variation is five degrees more with a 40% decrease in rainfall. The results are very worryingIn the first situation, growth would slow down a lot, but in the second, directly, there would be no growth.

Although for the moment they are just that, mathematical models, they are a good example of how the effects of climate change affect us more than we could at first imagine.

More information, here.


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