Trees talk to each other, they communicate, they share resources,
they share information.
Trees are not individuals.
They're connected together.
And this makes the forest a whole connected place.
There are solutions to these problems.
We need to be ingenious and adaptive, these forests are
resilient, that there are systems meant to heal.
They're meant to evolve and adapt.
We have the ability to work with our forests to save our forests for
the future.
So I started out as a forest scientist trying to
understand how to grow trees.
I felt that we were disconnecting the forest into, you know, its
little parts and ignoring these other essential processes that are
important to forest dynamics.
I published this work in Nature in 1997, and Nature dubbed the
experiment the Wood Wide Web. And the Wood Wide Web is really just
this network of fungi that links trees together and provides avenues
for them to share resources.
These trees can send messages back and forth to each other through
these fungal networks.
So it really does behave a lot like and is patterned a lot
like the Internet.
The soil is packed full of mycelium.
Every pore, every soil crumb is covered with mycelium and the
mushrooms that emerged from that mycelium, that's what you see in
the forest. And it really is just the tip of the iceberg.
And under a single footstep, there can be literally hundreds of
kilometres of mycelium.
The fungus grows these threads from the root tips and these
threads run through the soil, picking up nutrients and delivering
it back to the plant. But they also run through the soil and
eventually can connect with other trees that forms
the mycorrhizal network.
So I had a graduate student, Kevin Byler. Kevin spent
his doctoral thesis mapping what these networks look like in for us.
Pretty much every tree was connected to every other tree.
The centres or the hubs of this network were the big old trees.
They were the most highly connected.
And ultimately, we went on to discover that these networks were
important in the regeneration of these young trees coming up
underneath these old trees. The old trees transmit carbon, water,
nutrients to these seedlings and especially their kin, it turns out.
And so this all, you know, came together to help us
understand that these old trees really were like the
nurturing nuclei of the forest.
That's why we started to call them mother trees.
Mother trees are a crucial keystone in regeneration of forests.
They are also homes to animals and lichens and mosses and,
you know, all kinds of creatures live on them and in them.
So they're basically scaffolds for biodiversity.
They also store a ton of carbon.
So, you know, in the climate change era, these old trees really
are important carbon pools.
Our forests are under increasing stress from changing climatic
conditions and this puts trees and regenerating trees under
enormous stress.
The drier it becomes, the more harsh it becomes, the more
important these networks are to the resilience of the forest.
If we keep going the way we're going, if we keep taking out these
old trees, we keep clearcutting them.
You can think of it like rivets in an airplane, you can take out
one or two rivets and the plane will still fly.
But if you take more and more rivets and if you take out that key
one that's actually holding on the wings of the prop, then the system
will collapse. We don't want to get to that point.
So I developed this project called the Mother Tree Project to try and
take the ideas of connection and collaboration, as I mentioned,
to bring it to forestry practices. The objective of this
project is how do we create or how do we foster forests or help manage
forests so that they continue to be resilient as climate changes.
My name is Smhayetsk, I'm Suzanne from the Gitlan tribe.
The House of Bilhaam ne'ex then had a plan.
One of the really
interesting things about The Mother Tree Project is we get to
demonstrate the connections of these mother trees below ground
with each other and forming communities.
And this is something that we have known in our Aboriginal science for
thousands of years.
It's advised my research, it's changed the way I look at things,
the way I interpret things.
And so this has led me to work more and more with indigenous
people. And what we found is actually quite brilliant.
For one, we found that natural regeneration under these trees has
increased manifold when we have old trees.
It makes sense; they provide seed, they provide protection, and the
more mother trees we leave and the more we leave them in groups,
in clusters, where they protect each other, the better the
regeneration it is
and also the more diverse it is. The more diverse the forest, the
more it's able to actually take up carbon and store in stable
pools. And also of importance is that when we migrate seedlings
from warmer climates, survival is increased by 20 to 30 percent when
they're protected by these old trees.
This is really good news, this means that we have a lot of agency
as human beings and helping these forests to keep up with the
velocity of climate change, regenerate and be preadapted to
changing conditions in the future.
And so the forest is stronger when these trees are allowed to have
those connections with each other, when the roots are all connected
below ground. It's like our communities, when we're all
connected, it keeps us stronger.
This is what I've been trying to put together in my own mind, in my
own Western scientific training, and trying to understand what we're
doing, why we're disconnecting, it is about connection.
Our lives are enriched by our relationships.
It's the same with trees and plants and soils.
And this gives me great hope that we have the ability to save
ourselves from environmental collapse.