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May 22 - June 3, 2021
carbon dioxide finds its final resting place in the form of humus, which continues to become more concentrated as it ages. In the far distant future, it might even become bituminous or anthracite coal.
Wouldn’t it be beautiful and meaningful if we allowed our trees to follow in the footsteps of their ancestors by giving them the opportunity to recapture at least some of the carbon dioxide released by power plants and store it in the ground once again?
Today, hardly any coal is being formed because forests are constantly being cleared,
For every log you burn in your fire at home, a similar amount of carbon dioxide is being released from the forest floor outside.
less (carbon dioxide) is more (life-span).
If we want to use forests as a weapon in the fight against climate change, then we must allow them to grow old, which is exactly what large conservation groups are asking us to do.
Apart from the fact that trees can negatively affect the exterior of buildings, I find it fascinating how much spruce and other species influence microclimates in their vicinity.
Spruce and firs can’t do this. The crafty firs like to mix in with the beeches, whereas the spruce usually stick together, which means they’re often thirsty. Their crowns act like umbrellas, which is really convenient for hikers.
Why do spruce do this? They have, quite simply, never learned to adapt to water shortages.
Deciduous forests intercept only 15 percent of the rain that falls, which means they are profiting from 15 percent more water than their needle-bedecked colleagues.
As an added security feature, the beaver builds these entrances underwater so that predators can’t get in. The rest of the living space is above water and therefore
Although beavers damage the forest around them, they exert a positive influence overall by regulating water supplies. And while they’re at it, they provide habitat for species adapted to large areas of standing water.
comes out the other end in large droplets. Aphids need to saturate themselves like this because the sap contains very little protein—a nutrient they need for growth and reproduction. They filter the fluid for the protein they crave and expel most of the carbohydrates, above all sugar, untouched.
The subletters are species that can’t work with wood themselves. There’s the nuthatch, which is somewhat like a woodpecker but much smaller. Like woodpeckers, it hops around on dead wood, pecking away to get at beetle larvae.
intent on eating its brood. To prevent this, the bird makes the entrance smaller using mud, which it arranges artfully around the perimeter.
Healthy trees advertise their readiness to defend themselves in the coming spring by displaying brightly colored fall leaves.51 Aphids & Co. recognize these trees as unfavorable places for their
To protect its needles from freezing, a conifer fills them with antifreeze. To ensure it doesn’t lose water to transpiration over the winter, it covers the exterior of its needles with a thick layer of wax.
when it developed deciduous trees about 100 million years ago, conifers had already been around on this planet for 170 million years. This means deciduous trees are a relatively modern invention.
Tokin writes that the air in young pine forests is almost germfree, thanks to the phytoncides released by the needles.56 In essence, then, trees disinfect their surroundings.
Walnuts have compounds in their leaves that deal so effectively with insects that garden lovers are often advised to put a bench under a canopy of walnuts if they want a comfortable place to relax in the garden, because this is where they will have the least chance of being bitten by mosquitoes.
Moss doesn’t damage the tree, and the tiny plants compensate for the small amount of water they divert by releasing moisture as well, so their influence on the forest climate is positive.
YOU EVER wondered why giant redwoods in Europe never grow particularly tall? Even though quite a lot of them are more than 150 years old, very few have yet topped 160 feet. In their homeland— forests on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountains in California—they easily grow more than twice that size.
the roots in the pipes were growing above the water table and did not seem interested in extra nutrients. What was attracting them was loose soil that had not been fully compacted after construction. Here, the roots found room to breathe and grow.
There are, however, a few species of tree that couldn’t care less about the forest’s comforts and social interactions and prefer to strike out on their own. These are the so-called pioneer tree species (that sounds much better), which like to grow up as far away from their mothers as they can. Accordingly, their seeds are capable of flying long distances. They are very small and padded or equipped with tiny wings so that powerful storms can carry them for miles. Their goal is to land outside the forest, where they can colonize new areas.
But their lives would be relatively short compared with other forest trees even without the hard-hitting competition.
Climate change is making the north warmer, and so, in the future, it will be able to expand its range in this direction. At the same time, it will eventually get so hot to the south that the tree’s whole range will shift in a northerly direction.
combination with ultraviolet light, can burn human skin. Every year, millions are spent digging up plants and destroying them, without any great success. However, hogweed can spread only because the original forested meadows along the banks of rivers and streams no longer exist. If these forests were to return, it would be so dark under the forest canopy that hogweed would disappear. The same goes for Himalayan balsam and Japanese knotweed, which also grow on the riverbanks in the absence of the forests. Trees could solve the problem if people trying to improve things would only allow them to
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Native must be understood on a much smaller scale and be based not on human borders but on habitats.
The air truly is considerably cleaner under the trees, because the trees act as huge air filters.
make sense if we could intuitively pick up on the state of our surroundings. There is a scientific observation that speaks to this: the blood pressure of forest visitors rises when they are under conifers, whereas it calms down and falls in stands of oaks.
Walkers who visit one of the ancient deciduous preserves in the forest I manage always report that their heart feels lighter and they feel right at home. If they walk instead through coniferous forests, which in Central Europe are mostly planted and are, therefore, more fragile, artificial places, they don’t experience such feelings.
Contrary to popular opinion, the air in the forest is not always particularly rich in oxygen.
It seems trees need their rest just as much as we do, and sleep deprivation is as detrimental to trees as it is to
In 1981, the German journal Gartenamt reported that 4 percent of oak deaths in one American city happened because the trees were subjected to light every night.
They brought young oaks and beeches into their houses, where they kept them in pots on windowsills. In cozy living rooms there’s no such thing as winter as far as the temperature is concerned, which means most of the young trees couldn’t take a breather and just continued to grow. But at some point, lack of sleep exerted its revenge and the plants, which had seemed so full of life, died.
some conservationists are thrilled when storms or commercial forestry operations disturb the forest ecosystem by opening up large clearings. They truly believe the open space increases species diversity, and they miss the fact that this is traumatic for the forest.
In exchange for a few species adapted to open areas that now feel like a million dollars basking happily in the bright sun, hundreds of microscopic organisms of little interest to most people die out locally. A scientific study by the Ecological Society of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland concluded that although increased forest management leads to increased richness in the diversity of plant life, this is no cause for celebration but rather proof of the level of disturbance of the natural ecosystem.
Great Bear Rainforest in northern British Columbia, which covers almost 25,000 square miles along the rugged coast. Half of this area is forested, including about 8,900 square miles of old-growth trees.
home to the rare spirit bear, which although it is white, is not a polar bear but a black bear with white fur.
Central Europe,
there really isn’t any undisturbed nature left here. The old-growth forests disappeared centuries ago,
today, once again, there are large tree-covered areas next to settlements and fields, but these are plantations rather than forests—the trees are all the same species and the same age. Politicians are beginning to debate whether such plantings can really be called forests at all.
Don’t we read every month about the dangers of walking out under old trees? Falling branches or complete trees that fall across footpaths, sheds, or parked cars? Certainly, that could happen. But the dangers of managed forests are much higher.
More than 90 percent of storm damage happens to conifers growing in unstable plantations that fall over with wind gusts of 60 miles an hour.
More and more people are giving up meat altogether or giving more thought to how they buy meat to promote the humane treatment of animals.
it is okay to use wood as long as trees are allowed to live in a way that is appropriate to their species. And that means that they should be allowed to fulfill their social needs, to grow in a true forest environment on undisturbed ground, and to pass their knowledge on to the next generation. And at least some of them should be allowed to grow old with dignity and finally die a natural death.
What organic farms are to agriculture, continuous cover forests with careful selective cutting are to silviculture.
Switzerland, a whole country is concerned with the species-appropriate treatment of all things green. The constitution reads, in part, that “account [is] to be taken of the dignity of creation when handling animals, plants and other organisms.”
I, for one, welcome breaking down the moral barriers between animals and plants.
THE UNDERGROUND SOCIAL networks of trees that Peter Wohlleben describes in his home woodlands of Germany were discovered in the inland temperate rainforests of western North America. In the early 1990s, when searching for clues to the remarkable fertility of these Pacific forests, we unearthed a constellation of fungi linking manifold tree species. The mycelial web, as we later discovered, was integral to the life of the forest.
This quote went on to say how Suzanne Simard, professor at UBC, discovered this. She wrote "finding The Mother Tree".
