Her initial inklings about the importance of mycorrhizal networks were prescient, inspiring whole new lines of research that ultimately overturned longstanding misconceptions about forest ecosystems. Now a professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia, Simard, who is 60, has studied webs of root and fungi in the Arctic, temperate and coastal forests of North America for nearly three decades. “I was more interested in how these plants interact. “The old foresters were like, Why don’t you just study growth and yield?” Simard told me. Apart from her supervisor, she didn’t receive much encouragement from her mostly male peers. For her doctoral thesis, Simard decided to investigate fungal links between Douglas fir and paper birch in the forests of British Columbia. Research had demonstrated that mycorrhizas also connected plants to one another and that these associations might be ecologically important, but most scientists had studied them in greenhouses and laboratories, not in the wild. Underground, trees and fungi form partnerships known as mycorrhizas: Threadlike fungi envelop and fuse with tree roots, helping them extract water and nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen in exchange for some of the carbon-rich sugars the trees make through photosynthesis. Simard suspected that the answer was buried in the soil. The planted saplings had plenty of space, and they received more light and water than trees in old, dense forests.
In particular, Simard noticed that up to 10 percent of newly planted Douglas fir were likely to get sick and die whenever nearby aspen, paper birch and cottonwood were removed.
Instead, they were frequently more vulnerable to disease and climatic stress than trees in old-growth forests. Without any competitors, the thinking went, the newly planted trees would thrive. Loggers were replacing diverse forests with homogeneous plantations, evenly spaced in upturned soil stripped of most underbrush.
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To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.īy the time she was in grad school at Oregon State University, however, Simard understood that commercial clearcutting had largely superseded the sustainable logging practices of the past. When she began attending the University of British Columbia, she was elated to discover forestry: an entire field of science devoted to her beloved domain. She experienced it as “nature in the raw” - a mythic realm, perfect as it was. The forest seemed ageless and infinite, pillared with conifers, jeweled with raindrops and brimming with ferns and fairy bells. They took so few trees that Simard never noticed much of a difference. Her grandfather and uncles, meanwhile, worked nearby as horse loggers, using low-impact methods to selectively harvest cedar, Douglas fir and white pine. What are they sharing with one another?īy Ferris Jabr Photographs by Brendan George KoĪs a child, Suzanne Simard often roamed Canada’s old-growth forests with her siblings, building forts from fallen branches, foraging mushrooms and huckleberries and occasionally eating handfuls of dirt (she liked the taste). Trees appear to communicate and cooperate through subterranean networks of fungi.
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