Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

by Suzanne Simard

Upon developing the film, he saw the path the charged particles had taken as they moved from pine to pine.

They had traveled through the underground fungal network.

I wondered if this could be detected outside the lab, in real forests.

Maybe competition with the environment as a whole helps them to EVOLVE into cooperation

Mabel Lake,

hyphal links.

phloem—the

sieve cells

xylem—the

photosynthate

(While leaves are the source of photosynthate, roots are sinks.)

turgor pressure.

the source-sink gradient

Simard Mountain.

hyphae

Simile

Then I would know if trees were in a more sophisticated tango than just a competition for light.

triplet

Burch, fir, cedar

Barb asked why I’d included cedar next to the birch and fir.

arbuscular mycorrhizas,

ectomycorrhizas

I’d planted cedar as a control,

Ingenious

the gas analyzer measures the rate of photosynthesis.

Infenious

Ingenious

birches

fir

confirming there was a steep source-sink gradient between them.

From source birch leaves to sink fir roots.

Kristina Arnebrant,

showed that alder delivered nitrogen to pine through mycorrhizal connections,

foliar s...

Like between the nitrogen-fixing alder and nonfixing pine in Kristina’s study.

With gradients in both carbon and nitrogen—carbon in sugars and nitrogen plus carbon in amino acids—birch was perfectly equipped to shuttle more food to fir than it received in return.

Stein River,

Asking Rock

Dan Durall,

K.J. Beiler, D.M. Durall, S.W. Simard, S.A. Maxwell, and A.M. Kretzer, “Mapping the Wood-Wide Web: Mycorrhizal Networks Link Multiple Douglas-Fir Cohorts,” New Phytologist, 185 (2010). Teste, F. P., Simard, S. W., and Durall, D. M. 2009. Role of mycorrhizal networks and tree proximity in ectomycorrhizal colonization of planted seedlings. Fungal Ecology 2 Durall, D. M., Gamiet, S., Simard, S. W., et al. 2006. Effects of clearcut logging and tree species composition on the diversity and community composition of epigeous fruit bodies formed by ectomycorrhizal fungi. Canadian Journal of Botany 84. 3 articles in 3 journals in 2009, p. 327

learned that half of the carbon was shuttled and stored belowground—in roots, soils, and microbes such as mycorrhizal fungi.

It was the early 1990s,

climate change

Haha

Simile - haha

we’d be pulp from the insects.

Haha - simile hyperbole

Whew! Ingenious and meticulous

I was so focused on what moved through the mycorrhizal networks

But Dan insisted we could do better than that.

Simile hyperbole

p. 319, 320

Ingenious and meticulous

Haha