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There was now—already—as much water in the dense-alder treatments as in the bare-earth patches.
Don’s soil samples showed that killing alder halted new nitrogen additions to the soil because the nitrogen-fixing bacterium Frankia had been eliminated when the alder roots died.
Deficits in nitrogen, along with cold temperature, are known to limit tree growth in northern forests.
This suggested to me that for most of the time, other than the most stressful weeks in August, alder was replenishing both water and nitrogen in the soil. How this forest functioned was turning out to be much more complex than the blunt free-to-grow policy presumed.
removing alder was reducing additions of transformed nitrogen to the soil.
I worried that in the long haul, in the decades to come, the reduction in soil nitrogen would reduce the growth rates of the open-grown pines that remained.
Swedish researcher, Kristina Arnebrant, who’d just found that a shared mycorrhizal fungal species could link alder with pine, delivering nitrogen directly.
Pine got nitrogen from alder not through the soil at all but thanks to mycorrhizal fungi!
how the symbiotic bacteria and mycorrhizas in the roots of the alder, and the other invisible creatures in the soil, helped the pine.
the government and cash-minded companies focused on cheap, quick fixes and the bottom line.
“There is no benefit to the pines by removing just the alder—you have to kill all of the herbs and pinegrass too if you want fast pine growth,”
In the same subalpine environments, spraying ferns into pincushions did not improve the long-term survival rate of spruce, but the short-term height growth of the prickly seedlings was a quarter more than where the ferns were left alive. These minimal, temporary yields were enough to satisfy the policymakers.
We should change our focus from weed-free trees in hopes of short-term growth gains and instead consider what makes the whole forest healthier over the long term.”
I’m worried that we’re trading increased early growth for lower survival in the long run.”
“Fuck you!”
YO WHY KELLY BE SEXIST BRUHHHH
I sent Kelly a postcard in apology, but he never wrote back.
Why tf did she apologize?!
Sir David Read, a professor at the University of Sheffield, and his students, who’d found that a pine seedling had transmitted carbon belowground to another pine.
They had traveled through the underground fungal network.
As long as leaves synthesize sugars through photosynthesis, enhancing the source strength, and as long as roots keep metabolizing the transported sugars to make more root tissues, enhancing the sink strength, the sugar solution keeps moving by pressure flow down the source-sink gradient from leaves to roots.
My plan was to label paper birch with the radioactive isotope carbon-14 so I could follow the photosynthate traveling to Douglas fir, and at the same time I’d label Douglas fir with the stable isotope carbon-13 to trace photosynthate moving to paper birch.
By measuring how much of each isotope ended up in each seedling, I could also calculate whether birch gave more to fir than it got in return. Then I would know if trees were in a more sophisticated tango than just a competition for light.
shifting their behaviors according to the functioning of their community.
This is important it's her realizing the connection that the trees/plants have with each other
Cedar can’t form mycorrhizal fungal partnerships with the birch
The fully illuminated birches were photosynthesizing at double the rate of the fir seedlings in full sunlight. Eight times the rate of the firs in the deep shade of the green tents, confirming there was a steep source-sink gradient between them.
The birch had double the concentration of nitrogen in its leaves compared to the fir needles. Not only did this help explain the higher photosynthetic rates of birch compared to fir (nitrogen is a key component of chlorophyll), it also meant there was a nitrogen source-sink gradient between the two species.
We were listening to birch communicate with fir.
There was no way to undo my mistake. What was done was done.
BRUHHHHH
but he didn’t know if they connected the trees or transmitted nutrients.
Birch and fir were trading carbon. They were communicating. Birch was detecting and staying attuned to the needs of fir. Not only that, I’d discovered that fir gave some carbon back to birch too. As though reciprocity was part of their everyday relationship.
Roots didn’t thrive when they grew alone. The trees needed one another.
I could never make amends. We would never reconcile. Our final words brutal parting shots in drunken anger and misunderstanding. Brother and sister. Shattered forever.
IM SOBBING
I couldn’t save Kelly. But maybe I could save something.
STOPPP
Some were good at acquiring phosphorus from humus, others nitrogen from aging wood. Some sopped up water from deep in the soil, others from shallow layers. Some were active in spring, others in fall. There were some that produced energy-rich exudates that fueled bacteria performing other jobs, such as breaking down humus or transforming nitrogen or fighting disease, while other fungi produced fewer exudates because their jobs required less energy.
I now knew that birch and fir were connected and communicated, but it didn’t make sense that birch always gave more carbon to fir than it received in return. If this were always so, fir might eventually drain the life out of birch.
I was testing whether birch continued to help fir through the childhood years, and whether fir eventually gave back—perhaps in the off-seasons of early spring and late fall, when birch had no leaves—and did so even more as fir slowly, naturally overtook birch in early adulthood.
The firs connected with their birch neighbors were not only all living, they were larger than the trenched firs. The birches, on the other hand, were unaffected by their intimacy with the firs, not drained by the association.
Within a week, Nature replied that they had chosen not to publish the critique.
WHAT
suggested that the trees were in a sophisticated exchange pattern, possibly reaching a balance over the course of a year.
Birch was benefiting from fir, just as fir was benefiting from birch. Quid pro quo.
This research told me which sizes of trees were most competitive or cooperative or both, and what types of land were most problematic, so that weeding practices could focus on just those elements.
pointing at histograms proving that clear-cutting and removal of birch was detrimental to the long-term productivity of the forest.
The numbers showed that forest growth declined with each successive one-hundred-year cutting-and-weeding cycle.
Maybe birch and fir, and Armillaria ostoyae and fluorescent pseudomonads, are in a prisoner’s dilemma where, in the long run, the benefits of group cooperation outweigh the costs of individual prerogatives.
Ecosystems are so similar to human societies—they’re built on relationships. The stronger those are, the more resilient the system.
“Don’t print this, but between you and me, for all the good the foresters are doing, they might as well paint rocks.”
Im confused like making things pretty instead of fixing?
As birch reaches about fifty, near the end of its lifespan, it becomes more susceptible to Armillaria sinapina, with many risking infection of stem and roots.
If we start managing forests for increased carbon storage—to slow climate change—birch might be a good choice,”
“I’ve seen the projections, and climate change is going to be our biggest threat before long.
sweeping my hand in the shape of a hockey stick to trace a graph of how atmospheric carbon-dioxide concentrations have skyrocketed since the 1950s.
I explained, because destumping compacted the soil and destroyed native plants and microbes. “And it’s expensive,”
