Potential effects of the increase in carbon dioxide and climate change on the dynamics of vegetation

The continued CO₂ loading of the atmosphere appears to be responsible for inducing three new force factors controlling dynamic changes in the world's vegetation. They come from (1) enhanced fertilization with the single most important plant nutrient, (2) the widely expected global temperature increase, and (3) aggravated weather disturbances. Increased CO₂ absorption may enhance plant growth but it may also increase soil-nutrient limitations. It surely will enhance the metabolism of forest trees similarly as global warming will enhance plant metabolism, but both factors may also shorten the lifespan of perennial plants. Increased weather disturbances can be expected to produce new physiological stresses on the standing vegetation, particularly on habitats with poor soils. Since wide-spread forest decline has been reported from both the Atlantic and Pacific region, it seems possible that the roughly synchronie mass mortality of trees during the past two decades is related to the global increase in CO₂. The paper gives an overview of forest decline and dieback as known from past and present research and suggests how the changing atmospheric environment may interact in this widely observed contemporary phenomenon of vegetation dynamics.