Do younger trees grow more than older trees? Nope!

A common misconception about forests is that young trees grow more than older trees, which isn’t actually isn’t true in most cases. A trees growth is dictated by the amount of sugars it can create through photosynthesis, which depends on the amount of leaves it has available to photosynthesize.

There are tiny pores on leaves called Stomata which allow water (H20) to transpire out through them, mixing with CO2 in a chemical reaction through photosynthesis that releases Oxygen (O2) and creates sugars, or glucose (C6H12O6). This transpiration of water here creates a negative pressure gradient in the tree that draws water up from it’s roots through it’s Xylem, and once photosyhthesis occurs, those sugars created flow back through a trees Phloem to its roots and cambium elsewhere to generate more Xylem and create more mass.

Since bigger older trees tend to have more leaves and thus more surface area to conduct photosynthesis, they are able to create more sugars and generate more mass than smaller, younger trees with fewer leaves. Yet this is where perception of scale comes into play here! Smaller trees put on more mass relative to their size every year, so we tend to think they grow faster because we can see them go from 1 to 3 meters in a short period of time, which seems like a big deal from our human perspectives on the ground. Alternatively, bigger older trees have the appearance of being more stagnant, as their growth can’t be seen as easily on the same proportions, even though they’re actually accumulating much more mass seasonally than younger ones.

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Produced & Directed by Ross Reid

~ I'd like to acknowledge that this video was filmed on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the Coast Salish peoples–Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Stó:lō and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm Nations. ~

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