AUTHOR=Liu Yichen , Zhang Junru , Rao Shanshan , Xu Kun TITLE=Sleet damage to branches and crowns of street camphor trees (Cinnamomum camphora) in a central China mega-city: damage statistics, modelling, and implications JOURNAL=Frontiers in Forests and Global Change VOLUME=7 YEAR=2024 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/forests-and-global-change/articles/10.3389/ffgc.2024.1391645 DOI=10.3389/ffgc.2024.1391645 ISSN=2624-893X ABSTRACT=Introduction

Extreme weather becomes increasingly frequent and severe under climate change, causing unexpected damage to trees. Among them, sleet damage is particularly harmful to evergreen trees in subtropical area. Camphor trees (Cinnamomum camphora), as dominant street trees in central China, are prone to sleet damage, resulting in loss of valuable ecosystem functions.

Methods

By measuring tree size characteristics of 118 camphor trees before and after a record-breaking sleet event in Wuhan, a mega-city in central China, we built allometric equations between size and volume of broken branches and used the random forest regression to model sleet damage to camphor trees.

Results

We identified that larger trees with intermediate bole height suffered more than smaller trees with tall bole height from the sleet event. We estimated the volume of broken branches of a camphor tree with DBH at 35.0 cm as 106.4 dm3, equivalent to 55.3 kg biomass loss, from the sleet event.

Discussion

We suggest that pruning the branches instead of topping the main stems of small camphor trees would reduce the sleet hazard. To mitigate the negative impacts of climate change, regular pruning should be practiced on street camphor trees to protect them from future heavy sleet events.