I conducted lab studies to show that this bacteria, plated with Armillaria ostoyae, a pathogenic fungus that attacks firs and to a lesser extent birch, inhibits the growth of the fungus.
#Mom son in forest full#
One thing we found is that in the natural forest, the more the birch trees shaded the Douglas fir seedlings, the more carbon in the form of photosynthetic sugars the birches provided to them through the mycorrhizal network belowground.īirches are also full of nitrogen, which in turn supports bacteria that do all the work of cycling nutrients and creating antibiotics and other chemicals in the soil that counter pathogens and help to produce a balanced ecosystem.īut aren’t the soil bacteria creating the antibiotics for themselves, not for the trees? How do we know that they help the trees?īirch supplies carbon and nitrogen to the soil, exuded by the roots and mycorrhizae, and this provides energy for bacteria in the soil to grow. One species of bacteria that grows in the rhizosphere of birch roots is a fluorescent pseudomonad. I was sent in to find out why some of the firs in the tree plantations were not doing as well as the healthy young fir trees in the natural forest. As a young government tree scientist, you discovered that the birches were actually feeding the fir seedlings, keeping them alive. In British Columbia today, loggers sacrifice birches and broadleaf trees, which they see as competing for sun and nutrients with the firs they harvest. To me, it was always this incredibly connected place, even though I wouldn’t have been able to articulate that as a child. Spending time in the forest, as I did as a child, you know that everything is entwined and overlapping, things growing right next to each other. How did your childhood in rural British Columbia prepare you for life as a scientist? People may be surprised that you grew up in a logging family-not exactly a bunch of tree huggers. Among her most unconventional ideas is the pivotal role that the ancient giants she calls “mother trees” play in the ecosystem and our need to zealously protect them. Simard says people can take many actions to help forests-the world’s largest terrestrial carbon sink-recover and, in doing so, slow global warming.
Now they are causing climate change to advance faster than trees can adapt, leading to species die-offs and a sharp increase in infestations by pests such as the bark beetles that have devastated forests throughout western North America. Humans have been unraveling these webs for years, she says, through destructive practices such as clear-cutting and fire suppression. In it, she argues that forests are not collections of isolated organisms but webs of constantly evolving relationships. Simard’s first book, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest, was released by Knopf this week. In more recent work, she has found evidence that trees recognize their own kin and favor them with the lion’s share of their bounty, especially when the saplings are most vulnerable.
Previous ecologists had focused on what happens aboveground, but Simard used radioactive isotopes of carbon to trace how trees share resources and information with one another through an intricately interconnected network of mycorrhizal fungi that colonize trees’ roots. What captured the public’s imagination was Simard’s findings that trees are social beings that exchange nutrients, help one another and communicate about insect pests and other environmental threats. And her research was prominently featured in German forester Peter Wohlleben’s 2016 nonfiction bestseller The Hidden Life of Trees. Simard’s work also inspired James Cameron's vision of the godlike “Tree of Souls” in his 2009 box office hit Avatar.
The University of British Columbia ecologist was the model for Patricia Westerford, a controversial tree scientist in Richard Powers’s 2019 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Overstor y. Few researchers have had the pop culture impact of Suzanne Simard.
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