From her educational farm in Boisset in Haute-Loire, Fanny Agostini celebrates food, health and agriculture.
This Friday, she is interested in lightning which is one of the elements most often involved in the destruction of forests.
Extreme drought is the cause of the California fires, but in other parts of the world, it is thunderstorms that wreak havoc.
Lightning is also said to be a great killer of forests, the most devastating cause after deforestation.
Particularly in the tropical zones which concentrate half of the forest massifs of the planet and where thunderstorms are the most numerous in the world with each year 800 million trees which would be affected.
Studies on trees and lightning are very recent.
Not to say brand new.
For the very first time, a study to reveal the extent of the phenomenon.
Only a handful of researchers are working on the subject and it is only very recently that they have highlighted this shocking news.
Because previously, it was impossible to follow in real time the lightning which is unpredictable before striking.
But the detection systems having evolved, superimposed on satellite data, today we know how to do it.
When a lightning strikes the top of a tree, the discharge goes instantly to the roots which they are interconnected with other neighboring trees, and there it is a strike.
A lightning strike can reach up to twenty trees at a time.
A phenomenon exacerbated by climate change.
A warmer climate becomes more humid because there is more evaporation and therefore necessarily, it will be more unstable and therefore more stormy.
Taking this phenomenon of struck trees into account is very important for the future of forests, but also for the climate, because the fewer forests there are due to climate change, the less carbon the forests will absorb and therefore the more the climate will warm up.
We then enter into runaway effects that scientists themselves had not anticipated.