# Posted: 11 May 2021 22:41 - Edited by: KinAlberta
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This is fascinating stuff:
Exploring How and Why Trees ‘Talk’ to Each Other - Yale E360
 https://e360.yale.edu/features/exploring_how_and_why_trees_talk_to_each_other“… Yale Environment 360: Not all PhD theses are published in the journal Nature. But back in 1997, part of yours was. You used radioactive isotopes of carbon to determine that paper birch and Douglas fir trees were using an underground network to interact with each other. Tell me about these interactions. Suzanne Simard: All trees all over the world, including paper birch and Douglas fir, form a symbiotic association with below-ground fungi. These are fungi that are beneficial to the plants and through this association, the fungus, which can’t photosynthesize of course, explores the soil. Basically, it sends mycelium, or threads, all through the soil, picks up nutrients and water, especially phosphorous and nitrogen, brings it back to the plant, and exchanges those nutrients and water for photosynthate [a sugar or other substance made by photosynthesis] from the plant. The plant is fixing carbon and then trading it for the nutrients that it needs for its metabolism. It works out for both of them. It’s this network, sort of like a below-ground pipeline, that connects one tree root system to another tree root system, so that…â€
ENVIRONMENT / JUNE 2021 If a Tree Talks in the Forest, Does It Make a Sound? Ecologist Suzanne Simard uncovers the hidden connections beneath the forest floor BY SUZANNE SIMARD May 4, 2021 “… One tree was linked to forty-seven others, some of them twenty metres away. We figured the whole forest was connected by Rhizopogon alone. We would publish these findings three years later, in 2010, followed by further details in two more papers. If we’d been able to map how the other sixty fungal species connected the firs, we surely would have found the weave much thicker, the layers deeper, the stitching even more intricate. Not to mention the arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi adding interstitial components to such a map as they possibly joined the grasses and herbs and shrubs in an independent web. And the ericoid mycorrhizal fungi linking the huckleberries in their own network, and the orchid mycorrhizas with their own too. …†https://thewalrus.ca/if-a-tree-talks-in-the-forest-does-it-make-a-sound/
A pioneering forest researcher's memoir describes 'Finding the Mother Tree' | CBC Radio “My grandfather and his and my great-grandfather and all of my great-uncles and uncles and my dad were all horse loggers, and so I got to see how that was done. It was dangerous work. It was exciting work. It really shaped me. “… “… my job was to grow young plantations using the techniques that were thought to be important at the time, which meant clear-cutting. And then we were planting trees and then weeding out all the native plants, or as many as people could get out of there. Because the view at the time — and it still is — that competition that encroached on these crop trees. … It got me thinking, are we really doing the right things here? Don't these plants have some role to play in protecting these trees, to form a community with these trees? We were actually making the situation worse by …†https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/may-1-lightning-cleans-the-atmosphere-a-142-year-and- counting-experiment-and-more-1.6007496/a-pioneering-forest-researcher-s-memoir-descri bes-finding-the-mother-tree-1.6007500
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