When it comes to forest ecosystem services, or natural benefits, trees often come to mind first: they provide aesthetics, air and water filtration, and habitat. But many of these processes begin belowground. Forests account for 25 percent of the world’s biomass, and the fine root systems of trees are responsible for 75 percent of forest biomass production. This organic matter is essential to soil health and acts as a food source for many different species.
Tag: Trees
What we talk about when we talk about trees.
Thrive is the word I have chosen for 2021. I want to feel like I’m thriving with my healthy living goals. I want to thrive at work and watch our students thrive too. I want my wife and daughters to thrive and feel like their work and school experiences are not just about coping, or showing resilience, but about feeling successful and accomplished.
David, I really like how you go beyond yourself with your one work. It made me think about our responsibility for the earth and trees, a topic discussed on The Minecraft podcast.
While it is interesting to dig into the science of this and learn about photosynthesis, and study the exchange of gasses, and what happens to carbon in the process, it’s also wonderful to marvel at the idea of what’s happening: Trees grow and get their size out of the air.
David, you might be interested in Colin Tudge’s book The Secret Life of Trees, as well as Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate. Maria Popova has an interesting write-up.
I also enjoyed RN Future Tense’s exploration of the role played by trees in the fight against global warming.
A revolution has been taking place in the scientific understanding of trees, and Wohlleben is the first writer to convey its amazements to a general audience. The latest scientific studies, conducted at well-respected universities in Germany and around the world, confirm what he has long suspected from close observation in this forest: Trees are far more alert, social, sophisticated—and even intelligent—than we thought.
From Beech Trees in Germany to Douglas Firs in Canada to Acacia Trees in Sub-Saharan Africa, this post documents a change in the way that we appreciate trees and the connections to their environment.
“Some are calling it the ‘wood-wide web,’” says Peter Wohlleben in German-accented English. “All the trees here, and in every forest that is not too damaged, are connected to each other through underground fungal networks. Trees share water and nutrients through the networks, and also use them to communicate. They send distress signals about drought and disease, for example, or insect attacks, and other trees alter their behavior when they receive these messages.”
via Clive Thompson
Some 370 million years ago cladoxylopsid trees stood at least eight meters tall, capped by branches with twiggy appendages instead of leaves. They looked a bit like spindly palm trees. Today their scant remains reveal little about their insides; in most cases their innards had rotted before the trees fossilized, and storms had filled them with sand. But the recent find of two well-preserved fossils in China has exposed the trees’ inner workings—which are like no other species studied before.
Daisy Yuhas documents the discovery of an extinct tree with a trunk made up like laticework, a hollow core and no leaves.
via Freshly Brewed Thoughts by Laura Hilliger