How lightning is quietly reshaping forests

How lightning is quietly reshaping forests

Friday 1 Aug 2025

According to a new global study published in Global Change Biology, lightning directly kills approximately 320 million trees each year — a number that rivals other major causes of forest disturbance but has gone largely unrecognised. These deaths release an estimated 0.21–0.30 gigatons of carbon annually, underscoring lightning’s surprising role in shaping forest structure and the global carbon cycle.

Modelling a Hidden Killer

While lightning has long been associated with wildfires, its direct impact on tree mortality has rarely been quantified. To address this gap, researchers led by Andreas Krause at the Technical University of Munich integrated lightning mortality into a dynamic global vegetation model known as LPJ-GUESS.

Their approach used detailed field data from Barro Colorado Island in Panama, where each lightning strike was found to kill about 3.2 trees, often through lethal flashovers that affect neighbouring trees up to 45 meters away. By scaling these observations with global lightning density maps from satellite and ground-based sensors, the model simulated lightning’s effects across tropical and temperate forests worldwide.

Not Just a Tropical Problem

Simulations revealed that:

301–340 million trees (>10 cm diameter) are killed annually by lightning
24–36 million of these are large trees (>60 cm diameter)
Lightning causes 0.21–0.30 GtC of dead biomass annually
In a world without lightning, global forest biomass would be 1.3%–1.7% higher

Most of this mortality occurs in tropical Africa, where both lightning density and the prevalence of tall, vulnerable trees are high. However, the study also found that as climate change intensifies thunderstorms, lightning-induced tree deaths could increase in temperate and boreal forests.

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Source: ScienceBlog

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