The oldest tree in the entire European Union is a 1,481-year-old Canarian cedar found near the Teide volcano, in Tenerife, according to dating done by a group of researchers from the University Institute of Sustainable Forest Management of the University of Valladolid (iuFOR), the Rey Juan Carlos University of Madrid and the Teide National Park, which have applied the radiocarbon technique to find out its age.
Timanfaya National Park, front page of The New York Times this Tuesday
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The discovery was made during an investigation into the relict populations of Canarian cedar that live in the rocks of the Teide National Park, the result of which has been published in the prestigious journal ecology of the Ecological Society of America.
Access to these populations Juniperus cedrus, a species native to the Canary Islands, is quite difficult as they live perched on volcanic rocks that are only accessible with advanced climbing techniques; a challenge that they overcame thanks to the collaboration of local climbers, experts in conservation work in inaccessible areas and co-authors of the work.
The researchers verified after carrying out radiocarbon dating that several of the specimens studied were over 1,000 years old, and that even one of them was 1,481 years old, which makes it the oldest tree dated to date in the European Union. . “Several of the trees we have found are well over 1,000 years old, and we have looked at a small part of what there is, which makes us think that we are barely scratching the surface of what could be one of the most important redoubts of old trees. of the planet”, says Gabriel Sangüesa Barreda, Juan de la Cierva researcher at the Campus of the University of Valladolid (UVa), in Soria, and first author of the work.
The ability of trees to reach extreme ages is something extraordinary that happens very rarely, since external factors such as human action or natural disasters truncate their lives prematurely. For this reason, the search for exceptional trees is carried out in sparsely populated areas where major cataclysms do not occur, the researchers explain.
However, things are not always as they should be and sometimes the unexpected happens and a population of extremely old trees appears. These ancient trees have been able to survive five volcanic eruptions in the last 500 years, continuous rockfalls, and thrive in a cold, arid climate with hardly any soil. In this sense, “the trees thrive much better on the plain, but to persist they have had to take refuge in the cliffs, since the action of man has been much more devastating than the volcanoes,” says José Miguel Olano, also a researcher at the UVa in Soria and co-author of the work.
These trees are not only old, but also, together with the conservation and protection measures derived from the creation of the National Park, they are recolonizing the plains from which they were expelled. “The fruit of the cedars is dispersed by the action of birds, so the specimens that survived in the steepest areas are allowing the ancient cedar forests of the park to be recovered,” says José Martín Esquivel, co-author of the work and curator biologist of the Teide National Park.
The results of this research show how these ancient trees are not only witnesses of the past but also a key piece in the future of the species.
