Brian Palik, a research ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service, is part of a team of researchers conducting a nationwide study testing approaches to climate change adaptation for trees, called Adaptive Silviculture for Climate Change (ASCC). For red pine forests, studies show that removing some trees can improve the remaining trees’ resistance to drought. It looked at how numbers of different species and particular combinations of different species affect forest stability and found, contrary to a long-standing ecological hypothesis, that higher species diversity in forests did not contribute to forest stability.