YouSaid · the spoken record

Suzanne Simard

lines on the record: 40
first: 2021-05-14
most recent: 2021-05-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, and we do have brilliant modeling, right? We do have brilliant ways to look at this and analyze it properly. And we need to do it. We need to really take a whole system approach to analyzing the products and their uses and value.”
2021-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Language of Trees with Suzanne Simard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. I think that, you know, the key, though, is to try and get rid of these short-term uses and single uses of paper, because that would save a lot of forests, a lot of trees right off the bat.”
2021-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Language of Trees with Suzanne Simard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's true. I mean, you know, one of the things that horrifies me all the time is the amount of packaging we use, right? Do we really need to do that? That's a huge waste because we use it once or paper cups or it's like that single use product, those things I think should be outlawed, right? Because what a waste. Like, you know, using more natural materials if we need to package things or carry something from the grocery store, like carry it in a leaf or carry it in your backpack or, you know, and just refuse to use those things. I think there are some very smart things we can do to really reduce our consumption of these short-term products. And then, yeah, the long-term storage, like building cathedral, that is a good use, even though, you know, a standing tree is actually stores more carbon than even a wooden beam cathedral well or a wooden or a log house. But, you know.”
2021-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Language of Trees with Suzanne Simard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I'm not an expert in this at all, but certainly anything that creates a fiber you could probably create paper from. Actually, fungal material is being used for a lot of substitutes for wood products, even building materials, right? Myceleal bricks that you can actually build a house with. Even myceleal dresses and clothing. And yeah, so I think that And also just, you know, using our wood, we can still use wood. We can still use it more sustainably, right? Yes, substitution is important, but also just better use of what we do have as well.”
2021-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Language of Trees with Suzanne Simard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it's having enough of the old trees as a seed source around, so seed can disperse with most of it within a couple hundred meters of a living tree. And then those seeds will just naturally come in and augment whatever you might have planted there. And so then, of course, if As long as the network is, if those old trees exist, there then the network will exist, right? Because the old trees are photosynthesizing and feeding the network, and then the new seedlings and the naturally regenerated seedlings can tap into that existing network and get a head start. But if you leave it fallow, if you don't leave some of these old trees or if you cut and you don't plant or you don't foster natural regeneration right away, that network will disappear within a couple of years.”
2021-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Language of Trees with Suzanne Simard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“that we were looking at if they were naturally regenerated, they weren't attacked nearly as much they were much healthier, and they had far less incidents of disease. It was more like a natural forest. And so ultimately those are the trees that are going to form the next forest, not the planted ones, because the planted ones are on their way out. They're dying.”
2021-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Language of Trees with Suzanne Simard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, yes, I can definitively say yes because I've studied this and published about five papers on this myself in British Columbia where we were looking at plantations actually of Lodgepole Pine, which I know that you plant in Europe as well and Douglas fir. But this was a study on Lodgepole Pine and we found that there were 50 different damaging agents that were causing lethal damage to these plantations to the point where only half the trees would be left standing within a few years. And as the climate was warmer and warmer, which was up, you know, we were trying to project what climate change would do, it was worse and worse and worse. And so these, and it's because these pathogens and insects, they love warm wet conditions, right? They reproduce much faster under those conditions, and so then the infestations are worse. And so, yeah, but whereas the naturally regenerated trees, even in the same plantation.”
2021-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Language of Trees with Suzanne Simard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Generation. And the other thing that we found is that it changes their defense chemistry as well. There's information that goes to these seedlings, these especially kin seedlings, that they actually enhance their defense chemistry. We touched on this earlier, and that gets passed on to multiple generations down the road. And so these old trees are actually training their offspring to be more resilient to these herbivores that killed the original mother tree at the beginning. It's important to let these natural processes take place as much as we can instead of going in, like I think our automatic reaction is, let's go in and cut the tree down, get rid of it, burn it, or whatever. But in so doing, we're actually short-circuiting that natural process of teaching the next generation of how to survive.”
2021-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Language of Trees with Suzanne Simard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the first thing is that the reason that one of the reasons that we have the problem in the first place is that we've planted monocultures of ash trees or along boulevards where we don't have mixes of species. And so when you have a single species crowded together and no others, then if you get something like the Emerald Ashborough come in, it's of course going to kill those trees because that's all that's there. And so creating a more diverse forest urban forest or natural forest is the ultimate long-term key to this. But I'll also say that we've done experiments where we show that where we've actually stressed trees to the point where they're dying, and I haven't used the emerald ash borer, but other herbivores, insect herbivores, to stress trees. And what we found is that these dying trees, mother trees, actually transmit carbon to their seedlings, especially kin seedlings around them, to give them a boost to get onto the next”
2021-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Language of Trees with Suzanne Simard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The only other alternative they have, if they can't migrate, if they can't adapt, they'll die. And so as we know that climate is changing quickly, we're going to have to help trees migrate, right? So that we can keep forests on the ground so they can continue to keep carbon in the ground and carbon being sequestered and biodiversity. So it's going to be our job as human beings to help these forests to have a mix of naturally regenerated seedlings that are going to provide a scaffolding for these migrants that we can move them into and then they can work together to create a viable ecosystem. So in that sense, so that's not GMO though. That is just tree breeding and then moving assisting the migration. That's quite two different things, yes.”
2021-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Language of Trees with Suzanne Simard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I don't know a lot about GMO tree crops. I know that people are working on it. They have been for decades. And there certainly are plantations. I know in the southeast United States, they grow GMO cottonwoods, for example, to produce fiber for toilet paper and so on. So I know those do exist, but in forestry practices in Canada and where I'm from, they don't do GMO trees, but they do tree breeding. And tree breeding is taking, you know, natural genetic diversity and breeding for faster growing trees. And I think there is a place for this, but I think most importantly where genetics is essential that we, you know, as climate changes, the velocity of climate change is very rapid. It's much more rapid than trees can naturally adapt and evolve. And it's a lot faster than they are able to migrate as well. So trees”
2021-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Language of Trees with Suzanne Simard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The smaller trees and leaving the big old trees to bootstrap the natural regeneration and add in some planting to if necessary to make a healthy ecosystem, but that's diverse that we're actually fostering the diversity by leaving these old legacies behind. But the key point here is leave the old forest as much as we have left, as much as we can now, and focus our cutting on these second growth forest or already degraded forests. And then within those, work to enhance them, like leaving the old trees, introducing old growth elements into them. We can do that. We have enough knowledge to do that.”
2021-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Language of Trees with Suzanne Simard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so valuing for its ecosystems properly is essential, but we don't even need to put that in place quite yet. We can automatically right away just stop cutting down old growth forests because we can't environmentally afford to do this anymore in our globe, right? The feedback loops to climate change are huge. And we understand enough that we know it's not a good thing to do. And so then we can shift our focus if we, you know, we still need wood. We can shift our focus to second growth for us, or third growth, or places that have already been harvested because we've already lost the carbon stocks or a good part of them. And so, you know, let's focus on where the losses have already occurred. And in those forests, we can help them recover too. And the way we can do that is leaving the older trees in place. You can still take out the smaller trees around them, but selectively taking”
2021-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Language of Trees with Suzanne Simard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Into wood pellets and sending the wood pellets to the UK so that the Europeans can burn these wood pellets in their stoves as an alternative to fossil fuels. Well, actually that is more of an environmental disaster than burning the fossil fuels themselves because we're cutting down these boreal forests to create pellets and that's resulting in loss of biodiversity and huge emissions of carbon.”
2021-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Language of Trees with Suzanne Simard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a really good question, and I think that we can be way smarter about our consumption. You know, I think we're consuming as though we have an endless resource, right? There's a lot of basically overconsumption. And I think if we can use alternative materials, but we can also just use less, right? Do we need to keep or building huge houses in North America, for example, that people, you'll have two people living in these huge mansions, or that they don't need all that. They can live with smaller houses. The houses back in the 40s were like a tenth, I don't know, maybe that's an exaggeration, a fraction of the size of what they are now. So we need to be, you know, a little more humble, I think, in our consumption. Yeah, we do. And here's another point. You know, in British Columbia right now, we're having a big debate because we're turning some of our boreal forests and temperate forests.”
2021-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Language of Trees with Suzanne Simard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These ecosystems, even if we're putting in fertilizers and water and irrigating them and pruning them, they still are very vulnerable if you grow them as single species.”
2021-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Language of Trees with Suzanne Simard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It does. Yeah. And I think that's such economically driven, right? I know in British Columbia, we thought, oh, we made so much money off of Douglas or we're just going to grow Douglas fir. What were we thinking really? But we tried, you know, and it didn't work very well because we started getting our malaria root disease and phyllinus root disease and western spruce budworm. And it's like, well, that didn't work because we took this diverse community and tried to reduce it down to a commodity. And that commodity cannot be grown by itself alone. And it's interesting, you know, even today, you know, we're talking about, you know, how do we manage our land base? Well, we should zone off, you know, these plantations and have zones of plantations. Then we can have a zone of natural forest, then we can have a zone of wild forest. But those plantations, if we think that they're going to be the most productive places where we're going to make a lot of money, I think we're going to be fooled by that because”
2021-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Language of Trees with Suzanne Simard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is Yes, it is, and there's lots of studies to show that as diversity goes up, that productivity goes up and resilience goes up or its ability to resist infections and invasions and so on.”
2021-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Language of Trees with Suzanne Simard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's a complex system, right? It's neither socialism or capitalism. It's both, right? It is, you know, they compete, but they collaborate. They have these sophisticated ways of interacting and communicating. And that's what makes it a diverse and resilient society, right? It's like if we were all we ever did as humans was compete against each other and we get dominant individuals, well, society would collapse. We need to have these sharing, you know, collaborative and people have their different niches, right? They have their different areas of expertise and we work together to create this productive community. It's the same in a forest.”
2021-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Language of Trees with Suzanne Simard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, it's a community, a community of many species, and they're all linked together, and there is this fluid transmission between all the different species. And so, you know, certainly, you know, when we think of evolution in its very narrow sense, it's about survival of the fittest and individual species and how competition is such an important part of that. Well, it turns out collaboration is also an important part of that as well. And from a community point of view, trees and plants and animals, they grow in mixed communities. They don't grow all by themselves as a single species, as a population. And so, you know, this linkages actually happen between species, these below ground linkages, and there's a transmission of resources from one species to another. In fact, my first experiments were with birch and fir and that they transmit carbon back and forth between them. And, you know, this actually helped keep the community diverse and resistant to the”
2021-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Language of Trees with Suzanne Simard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“about the relatedness of these old trees to the seedlings. And that process is essential to regeneration of a healthy forest. So yeah, that's what a mother tree is.”
2021-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Language of Trees with Suzanne Simard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, yeah, I mean, I came up, or we came up with that name through a series of experiments. But the main thing is, well, just simply, they're the biggest, oldest trees in the forest. And the reason that they are the mother trees is because their root systems are vast. And if they're old, they have these fungal networks that are ancient or older mycorrhizal fungi that do all these amazing things in different niches in the soil. And so they're extensive, they're diverse, and they actually, through our experiments, we found that these networks nurture the regeneration of the new seedlings coming up. So these old trees will provide the network in which the natural regeneration establishes, and then the old trees will transmit resources like water and carbon and nitrogen and defense signals, and they even transmit information about the”
2021-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Language of Trees with Suzanne Simard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so that's what we're kind of dealing with down here. So the extent and the severity of fires are actually increasing as climate is changing. But, you know, I think that it doesn't mean that we should be excluding fire even more. It means that we need to be reintroducing fire to reinvigorate these communities because these forests are adapted. They need fire to do well.”
2021-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Language of Trees with Suzanne Simard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, fire is, you know, most of our fires, at least in the northern hemisphere, are fire regenerated for us. Sorry, most of our forests are fire regenerated for us. That means that they've adapted to fire and that they depend on fire to rejuvenate the forests. And so, you know, it's to our benefit to keep those natural fire regimes in place as much as we can. What we've done in North America is we've suppressed fire, and I'm sure that's probably the case in Europe as well, so that we can save these forests. In the case of North America, so that we can cut them down later and benefit ourselves, but in suppressing fire, we've actually made the situation worse because fuels build up and then the forests are more vulnerable. And as climate changes and the temperatures go up, when you have high fuel loads and high temperatures, all you need is a spark and you can have these huge megafires.”
2021-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Language of Trees with Suzanne Simard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, they will. I mean, as long as there are plants and they're photosynthesizing, and especially if you allow those trees and plants to carry out their full life cycle, you know, that the fungal community actually has a succession to it as well. So after a disturbance immediately or if you're trying to restore a grassland to a forest or a woodland, then that fungal network will be quite simple and maybe even different than it would be with a woodland and you might have to do some remediation of the network. But once the trees get going and aging, that the fungal network becomes more complex, you get these, I call them sort of old-growth fungal species come on and they have different niches, different functionalities, and then the system works better and better and better as the woodland gets older and older.”
2021-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Language of Trees with Suzanne Simard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In fact, in our own built systems, human systems, we mimic those systems because they're so efficient, like our transportation systems, the subway system, you'll have a few subway stations that are highly, you know, that are the key hubs and then all these other smaller ones that go to the smaller area, rural areas around it. So those neural networks, we see them ubiquitously across our social and built environments as well because they work so well.”
2021-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Language of Trees with Suzanne Simard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, they have serotonin in them as well. And so the combination of the pattern of the network that it's a neural network, that there are these glutamate compounds that move through them. And also we have synapses in these networks below ground as well between the fungus and the plant root where this transmission or this exchange goes on. And so there's a lot of parallels. And I think that The reason there are parallels is that these complex networks, these neural networks, they work, right? They're highly evolved across many different kinds of systems, not just in our own brains. And of course, what I'm describing here are not brains in the soil. They are patterns. They're patterns that have parallel functions and structures. But anyway, these neural networks are highly conserved across many systems because they work. They're efficient at moving information around their resilient.”
2021-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Language of Trees with Suzanne Simard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Yeah, it's got, it certainly has parallels to that. So I call it a biological neural network because when we map the network in the forest, we found that it has that pattern where you have a few, you know, nodes that are really big and highly connected and then a bunch of satellites and those will be the smaller trees connected by these fungal networks. And when we graph, when we use statistical graph theory to analyze that, it comes out as a neural network, which are quite complex with highly connected nodes and less connected ones, with linkages between them. And what we found is that these linkages, their conduits for transmission of resources that have certain chemistry to them. And one of the main resources that moves through or the compounds that moves through the network is glutamate, which is the same as one of our own neurotransmitters is glutamate. And we also know like plants.”
2021-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Language of Trees with Suzanne Simard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, to fight the zeal to cut down those last few trees in the name of what, you know, to make a few bucks, like it's just, it doesn't add up, right? We're far better off to leave those forests standing and to support these protesters so that we do make the government make the shift, right? That we value these forests more for their biodiversity and carbon storage and all that instead of, you know, to make a few bucks for the short term”
2021-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Language of Trees with Suzanne Simard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we do need to change our practices and our view, our worldview of forests instead of exploiting them, we need to be protecting them and fostering their regeneration. And I agree with you on natural regeneration, and we can combine natural regeneration with planting to bootstrap these ecosystems back into a productive state. But in British Columbia, where I live, it's gotten so critical approaching this tipping point that we actually only have”
2021-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Language of Trees with Suzanne Simard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Plant them quickly so they can grow a forest quickly so they can cut it down quickly. And those forests are very different than a naturally regenerated forest, as you say. I mean, we even go in forestry so far as to take out the native plants that are those early successional plants and short-circuiting natural selection so that we create these conifer plantations that really you've lost that such a crucial period. I call it like the healing period of the forest where after a disturbance, you have these plants come in because they have a role to play, right? To take up nutrients, to heal the soil and create a nice foundation for a nice diverse forest coming up.”
2021-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Language of Trees with Suzanne Simard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I wish there was more of it. We do have, you know, in some of our drier forests there's been a long history of what we call selective logging and that is where they leave old trees and to provide seed and then they self-regenerate under their own canopy, their shade tolerant trees. And they look pretty natural. And of course, we do have old growth reserves and preserves and protected areas. But most of our preserves are in parks are in areas where people go mountain climbing or hiking in the high elevations and they don't have the big valuable old trees. And so we really struggle with that as well. And, you know, our forestry practice is to when cutting happens and it's generally clear cutting, maybe leaving in the odd tree there, those are planted. They're all planted back. And we basically gotten on to what you're talking about, which is, you know, they...”
2021-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Language of Trees with Suzanne Simard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Restoring ecosystems that have been degraded from native woodlands or forests back to those native woodlands and forests is also absolutely crucial. And a woodland, as we talked about, is very different than a plantation. A woodland is where you have natural regeneration and we can assist that natural regeneration. But the trees when they get going, they're very different than a planted tree. They have roots that are complex. They're after resources. And so they adapt to their soil environment and they are linked into the legacies of the past. And so they're really productive. They're healthy. They're resilient. Whereas a plantation where we plant seedlings that are like disconnected from the ecosystem, those are completely different. They're not very diverse. They're not resilient. And they're not as valuable from a life support systems point of view.”
2021-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Language of Trees with Suzanne Simard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is full of two by fours. And so that's a fundamental shift we have to make. We absolutely have to put a price on carbon and hopefully biodiversity and water and air and all that. We haven't had to so far because, you know, it seems like we'd have had endless resources of forest. But, you know, where I live, which is sort of like the last frontier, British Columbia has in my lifetime has turned from a province of old growth forest to a province of clear cuts because we haven't valued these forests properly. So we have to do that. How do we do that? Well, people need to get behind their governments and force their governments to do it. And in order for people to get behind it, they need to understand the importance of these old forests. And then woodlands, as you said, you know, so conserving and preserving what we have left is paramount and then converting or”
2021-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Language of Trees with Suzanne Simard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm thinking. I think both. I mean, certainly the business model is based on, you know, it's a growth model and it's, you know, and it values for us based on, you know, very rudimentary products in British Columbia and Canada it's two by four is pulp and paper and that's a very low value assigned to the forest when it's actually our life sustaining support systems right as you mentioned earlier in our interview I mean these so we really need to value our forest based on the true you know importance of them to our lives you know you know their ability to clean water clean air store carbon biodiversity how do you put a price on that it we haven't we haven't taken that difficult step to do that but we have to and once we do that then we'll you know we'll start to say oh these old growth forests are way more valuable standing up than on a on a you know on a train with”
2021-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Language of Trees with Suzanne Simard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Decades, if not a century to recover to a neutral carbon content and then to become an old growth forest again, it will take that long again for them to become store as much. So that's the carbon story. That's a crucial story, right? Harvesting those old growth forests, you can't recapture that carbon in short periods of time. You can't recapture it with planting trees within the time period that we have left to change the course of climate change. And of course, the biodiversity is another question too. Like they are the homes of 80% of our biodiversity, terrestrial. And so losing that biodiversity is also super critical loss.”
2021-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Language of Trees with Suzanne Simard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That seed source basically disappears. The other thing that old forests do is they store a huge amount of carbon. And in the old growth forest, it's basically been accumulating for centuries. And when we cut those forests down pretty much automatically, you know, the removal of the trees themselves, most of that carbon over two-thirds of it is pretty much just dissipates into the atmosphere immediately because it's converted to the short-term products like toilet paper and so on. And then the below ground community also, which holds half the carbon, it's also enhances decomposition processes. And so there is an enormous loss of carbon over half by the time all is said and done and the system has started to decline and decompose. And then replacing these with seedlings, it takes”
2021-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Language of Trees with Suzanne Simard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those are all really good questions. The first question is what are the implications of modern forestry? And there are huge implications for one, the old growth forest that I grew up around. And these old forests that can be thousands of years old. They occur in the Amazon. They occur along the west coast of North America. They occur across the boreal forest. They occur in temperate forests. And these forests can be, like I said, hundreds to thousands of years old, which means that over that period of time, there's a number of things that have happened. One is climate has changed. It goes up and down. And that change, trees adapt to those changes, and they record it in the DNA that's in their seeds. And so they actually hold a repository of adaptability in their seeds. If we get rid of these old trees, then that”
2021-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Language of Trees with Suzanne Simard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“ponderous a pine. And so I was interested in whether as Douglas fir was basically receding from these margins and ponderosapine taking over whether there was this communication between the two species and found that Douglas Her was warning actually ponderosapine about injury and herbivores in the environment that were causing them to die back. And so it is an incredibly important phenomenon in the adaptability of forest as climate changes.”
2021-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Language of Trees with Suzanne Simard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, yes, actually, I worked with a scientist doctor Yan Yan Song, who is from China, and she worked with tomato plants and found this phenomenon between tomato plants, and so she came over as a postdoc and worked with me in our rainforest in BC, and we found, you know, we did these experiments and found the same thing is happening among trees. And we were actually working with trees of different species. So she worked with tomato plants. They're all the same species linked together in a network. I was working with Douglas fir and ponderosapine. And the reason I was interested in these two species is because as climate is changing, Douglas fir is receding along the drier margins of its distribution. So, you know, it interfaces with grasslands. And as climate, as the temperatures warm, it's moving upward. It will move upward in elevation and northward and in theory be replaced by”
2021-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Language of Trees with Suzanne Simard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source