Trees Shed Their Leaves to Adapt to Droughts

This map shows, for a large number of locations across the conterminous United States, the correlation between the Leaf Area Index (LAI), which is a measure of leaf density, as calculated with the tree model that includes leaf shedding with observations of LAI from remote sensing. Correlations are very high, particularly in areas with drier climates. Credit: Quetin et al. [2026], Figure 1e