Family Trees

How I tapped into the vast social network beneath the forest floor

- Suzanne Simard

Suzanne Simard is a professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia. Her research into how trees cooperate, share resources, and communicate through underground fungal —  or mycorrhizal —  networks has reached global influence, from Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees to the film Avatar.

THE TREES by the creek were dense and plump, and the ones at the top of the slope looked sparser and smaller. The soil would be drier there, water-shedding off the granite knoll like a toboggan sweeping downslope. By comparing the architecture of the network of the dry upper stand with this moist lower forest, I could see if the linkages up there, where water was more precious, were denser, more plentiful, more crucial to the establishment of a seedling.

At the first old tree, twenty metres in as I headed up the hill toward the crest, saplings skirting its crown like a hula hoop, I pulled out my T-shaped increment corer to check its age, thankful the handle was orange because the leaves of the thimbleberry shrubs were as big as dinner plates and could swallow anything that dropped. I fit the bit shoulder-high into a furrow of the tree’s chunky bark and cored the tree to the pith, drawing out a small cross-section of its striped insides.