00:02:54.740Well, I'm so delighted because I really feel like we share a sense of kinship, the similar kinship with the trees in the forest.
00:03:04.100I myself am nestled in a beautiful coastal redwood forest where I'm creating a native species nursery to restore the redwood forest community, but also the forest of Cascadia or the temperate rainforest bioregion.
00:03:21.340And I just am so grateful for all you do in service to these magnificent trees and forest and the biodiversity that spirals from them.
00:03:31.440It's just amazing to think about all of the biodiversity that is in the crowns that most
00:03:46.600Thick mats of moss and ferns, insects, the endangered marble murrelit, the threatened
00:03:52.700cloud salamander, fungi, you know, just the thought of these canopy beings.
00:03:57.960My heart really fills with excitement.
00:04:00.500So, you know, you have climbed many of these trees on four different continents and ventured many times into the tops of the Monteverde Cloud Forest of Costa Rica and the temperate rainforests of Washington state.
00:04:12.960So I would just love if we could start off by you treating us to a journey into the canopies and perhaps the canopies of both of these forest systems.
00:04:23.520Well, first of all, I thank you for that introduction.
00:04:26.240And I would really love to take every one of your listeners up into a real journey, up into a real tree.
00:04:32.100But since I can't do that at this moment, I would love to sort of invite you along to what happens, what you see, who you see, how you feel most of all.
00:04:41.480When you move from the dark, damp, still forest floor, whether you're in the temperate rainforest of Washington or the tropical rainforest of Costa Rica,
00:04:50.460And then you move up as you climb into really quite a different world, a space where there's lots of sunlight, where there's more wind than what you find on the forest floor, a greater view of vista rather than being enclosed.
00:05:03.660And so let's start at the bottom. Let's put on our climbing gear.
00:05:07.100I'm a forest canopy researcher who uses mountain climbing techniques to get up into tall trees.
00:05:12.620Other canopy ecologists use construction cranes, hot air balloons, canopy walkways, and most recently drones as well to try to explore the forest canopy.
00:05:23.020But when I started out as a graduate student in the College of Forestry at the University of Washington, really very few people had gone into the canopy before.
00:05:30.920I mean, I think most of us have all climbed trees when we were kids, but, you know, in terms of climbing very tall trees for the purposes of trying to document the biota and the interactions up there, really the 1980s, the canopy was actually called the last biotic frontier.
00:05:46.840and so there's this sort of feeling of expectation of curiosity of exploration as you put on your
00:05:54.420climbing gear regular harness you have ascenders like jumar ascenders of course you always have
00:05:59.640a safety line and you get ready to really to ascend into the upper canopy i'll just sort of
00:06:05.300preface that with a question that comes up which is like how do you get the rope up there to begin
00:06:09.320with and people use crossbows to shoot a like a fishing line up high into the trees that goes
00:06:14.920up and over a branch and then comes down to the forest floor. You tie a line onto that,
00:06:20.260a parachute cord onto that and pull that up. Then you tie a climbing rope onto that parachute cord
00:06:24.720and pull that up and over the branch, tie one end off onto the trunk, and then you have a nice safe
00:06:30.340secure anchor so you can climb the other side of the rope to get up into the canopy. I invented
00:06:35.500something called a master caster, which is just a metal rod that has a slingshot attached to one
00:06:40.940side and a fishing reel beneath that. It's, of course, much easier to get across international
00:06:45.580borders than a giant crossbow. So that has served me well. But once the line is up and over, and
00:06:51.380once our climbing gear is on, what we can do is basically slowly sort of inchworm up the rope
00:06:57.460itself. And as you move up from the forest floor, which is usually very dark because of all of the
00:07:02.820intervening vegetation, the leaves, the stems, the branches, and so forth that absorb most of
00:07:07.920the sunlight. In fact, only about 2% of the sunlight that strikes the forest canopy actually
00:07:13.520makes its way down to the forest floor. But as you start climbing, you sort of get intimate with
00:07:18.800the trunk. You start seeing the trunk as this really solid entity. And as you climb up, of
00:07:24.240course, it narrows. The branches sort of take off and you start seeing the architecture of the tree
00:07:29.240itself. Sometimes you can kind of read the body language of the tree. You see a twisted branch or
00:07:35.380a missing branch. And you can understand that these trees are not just fixed entities in terms
00:07:40.160of their size and shape, but rather respond to the environment as they grow and record those
00:07:45.820pressures with their own wood and leaves as you move up. As you get up to about 30 or 40 feet and
00:07:51.720start looking down on the ground, you realize you're really gaining a different perspective
00:07:55.040than what you had on the forest floor. I notice this, especially when I'm climbing into the
00:07:59.820temperate rainforests of the Olympic Peninsula. And you know, those sword ferns that are just sort
00:08:04.380of growing all over the ground when you look down on them from 30 feet above them you see they're
00:08:10.940really like green starfish they're these radially symmetrical organisms that you don't quite
00:08:16.700appreciate their structure when you're actually looking at them from the ground so you begin to
00:08:21.540see shapes and forms colors and relationships within the three-dimensional volume of the forest
00:08:27.180that's really impossible to appreciate when you're sitting on the forest floor anyway as you ascend
00:08:32.360you begin, especially if you're in a wet forest like the temperate rainforest of Washington State
00:08:36.940or the tropical cloud forest of Monteverde, Costa Rica, you start seeing these epiphytes,
00:08:42.580these plants that grow upon the branches of the tree. In the temperate rainforest,
00:08:47.100you see mosses and lichens and liverworts. The living plants in Costa Rica are much more diverse.
00:08:52.700You get bromeliads and ferns and orchids and blueberry bushes and all kinds of things that
00:08:58.000are living in the forest canopy there. And one of the things I have found most interesting is beneath
00:09:03.220these living plants on the branches of the trees, there's an accumulation of canopy soil. As they
00:09:09.280die and decompose, they actually create a soil that they root themselves in. Their roots don't
00:09:13.800go into the tree itself. But you realize as you're sort of hanging on your rope, looking at this
00:09:19.300mini ecosystem of the canopy, that all of the elements of a big ecosystem, the living plants,
00:09:25.200the mosses, and even the soils and microorganisms are present in these little canopy ecosystems.
00:09:31.940And so for me, that's been an intriguing piece of ascending into the canopy is seeing that these
00:09:36.800are not just one or two little isolated plants that live up there that are visited by isolated
00:09:41.980animals or birds, but rather they constitute their own living system. And my questions have really
00:09:47.820been about how does this mini living system of the forest treetops interact with the forest as a
00:09:53.700whole. And so when we get up into the forest canopy itself, when we sit on the highest branches
00:09:58.460and look out at the view of the forest from the top rather than the bottom, when we see birds
00:10:04.100moving from one treetop to another, or howler monkeys calling from the tree next door, or just
00:10:10.040sort of a nest of little bromeliads that are living their little lives up in these canopy soils high
00:10:15.600above the forest floor, we realize then that this is really an opportunity to think about
00:10:20.480how holistic a forest is, how connected it is, and yet it's still made out of these subcomponents,
00:10:27.260these little micro ecosystems that can get as small as a single microorganism or a single
00:10:32.820molecule of nitrogen and carbon. And yet somehow it all works together as a whole.
00:10:38.820And I guess I sometimes when I arrive to the top of the tree, and if you were sitting next to me,
00:10:44.020I might have a conversation more about spirituality than about biology, because
00:10:48.720I think that biologically and from the standpoint of the human spirit, getting and living and
00:10:54.960thinking about the tree canopy is really all about connections, which is something I think
00:10:59.620that all of us feel when we walk beneath the crowns of redwood forest or a lowland tropical
00:11:05.620forest or any sort of forest that we sense that really what it's about is connections.
00:11:11.600It's interesting to think about the connections of the canopy to the forest floor
00:11:18.200and just how unique both of these ecosystems are, yet they're within the same community.
00:11:27.800And it's just incredible to hear the experience that you've had time and time again of starting
00:11:34.460at the floor and working your way up, climbing into these trees and the wonder and the spirituality
00:11:40.460that you're talking about just this overwhelming connection to this place and you had mentioned
00:11:49.520that back in the 80s the canopies were the next frontier or maybe even the last frontier how much
00:11:56.880is still unknown about the ecological dynamics and biodiversity of forest canopies and what are
00:12:02.900some of the pieces that you have been learning that have really shifted knowledge well those
00:12:09.380are great questions. Maybe I'll start with the second question first, which is what have I
00:12:13.420discovered that was unknown before I and my colleagues went up there? And I can tell you
00:12:18.020that, you know, really, I mean, this is hard to believe now if you're a canopy scientist or like
00:12:21.900my young graduate students who are just doing canopy research as if it's sort of the most
00:12:25.980normal thing to do. But 35 years ago, when I was starting out, there really literally were very few
00:12:30.580people who were doing this. And I remember the first time I went to a tropical rainforest on
00:12:35.180the tropical field course in Costa Rica. And I looked up in the canopy and I'm like, oh my God,
00:12:40.040look at all those plants up there. And, you know, my professors just couldn't answer questions about
00:12:44.340what was going on up there. So I came back to Seattle to the College of Forestry and I got my
00:12:49.140committee together and I said, you know, I really want to study the forest canopy. And they looked
00:12:53.160at me sort of like I was cuckoo or not a scientist because they said, well, you know, Nalini, the
00:12:58.480canopy is just really part of the forest. And with so many questions on the forest floor, you don't
00:13:02.900really need to get up into the forest canopy. And I really reacted against that. And for some
00:13:07.960reason, I felt confident about this, almost, I guess, an instinct or something or intuition
00:13:13.540that, in fact, I did want to go up to the canopy, that I did need to go up into the canopy
00:13:18.500to understand the forest as a whole, that we were missing pieces of the jigsaw puzzle if we didn't
00:13:25.440go up there to study it. And I think, you know, I could sort of have taken a lead from marine
00:13:29.680biologists that when the scuba gear was invented, when biologists could spend hours and hours down
00:13:35.920in the lower parts of the ocean, they began making discoveries that were never possible
00:13:39.980if they stayed up in their boats on the surface of the ocean. And so I began with some of the most
00:13:45.400basic questions that can be asked about an ecosystem, which is, you know, how much material
00:13:50.580is up there? Who's up there? What are the species? How much does it weigh? What's the nutrient
00:13:56.000and content of this stuff? How much does it circulate when the stuff falls down? Does it
00:14:00.600decompose and get taken up by trees? What's its role in the ecosystem cycles of the forest as a
00:14:06.180whole? But if you want to start answering those kinds of questions, you still have to answer very
00:14:10.540basic pieces of it. And again, nobody had really studied anything basic about this. So I just
00:14:15.580started out by saying, well, how much stuff is up there? How many mosses? How much does this stuff
00:14:19.940weigh relative to the rest of the ecosystem? And as I went out to the Olympic rainforest and
00:14:24.800climbed these big leaf maple trees that are very dominant in the river bottoms of the four major
00:14:29.540river systems of the olympic peninsula on the west side i would peel away these mats of moss and the
00:14:35.580underlying canopy soils and i kept seeing these roots large roots small roots woody roots clearly
00:14:43.240not the roots of mosses because mosses don't have roots you know they have these little tiny rhizoid
00:14:48.140things that that aren't like woody plant roots at all and so i took samples and i brought them
00:14:53.820back to my major professor and I said, you know, Hey Chuck, what, what's with these roots in the
00:14:56.940canopy? And he said, what are you talking about? You know? And I said, well, there are roots up in
00:15:01.180the canopy that I've been climbing. And he said, I don't think you know what you're talking about.
00:15:04.080So I rented a chainsaw and I actually, you know, went up to the canopy and sought out these,
00:15:09.660the source of the roots, which were at the crotches of these large branches in the trunk,
00:15:13.560brought them back to my major professor. And I said, these are the roots I'm talking about.
00:15:18.120And he had never heard of it, but these are where canopy roots, they are produced by the trees
00:15:22.800themselves that snake underneath the mats of live and dead organic matter, those canopy soils I
00:15:29.340talked about. And the tree itself is capable of taking nutrients and water up from the very
00:15:34.520mosses and canopy soils that they're supporting. And so I realized then that this was kind of a
00:15:40.180never discovered phenomenon that in fact trees were kind of serving as the landlords to these
00:15:46.100mosses, but they were gaining a benefit from the presence of those mosses and soils. And so the
00:15:52.740whole kind of paradigm of nutrient cycling that people had sort of accepted before that
00:15:58.140fallen leaves and fallen mosses have to fall to the forest floor before trees could take advantage
00:16:03.540of them and take those nutrients up, I was able to sort of explode that because we were suddenly
00:16:09.580documenting that, in fact, nutrient transfer, nutrient uptake, water uptake can take place
00:16:15.880within the crown of a tree, which people just sort of hadn't realized that complexity of the
00:16:21.420nutrient cycles. So that sort of gave me, first of all, a wonderful sense of discovery, but also
00:16:27.320it gave me and other canopy researchers the sense that, wow, there really is a lot to see up there
00:16:33.220that we don't know on the forest floor processes as well as species. And so to go now to your first
00:16:39.380question about, you know, what remains unknown? Well, there's a tremendous amount of knowledge
00:16:44.180that we need to get in terms of what species are up there. Are there species that are specialized
00:16:49.860to the forest canopy that you would never see on the forest floor? Are there microenvironments
00:16:55.240and micro niches and micro substrates that favor one species to grow, but it may not grow somewhere
00:17:01.720else, even within a single tree crown? What is the role of these treetops in terms of intercepting
00:17:07.180rain and the nutrients that are contained in raindrops in terms of the well-being of the
00:17:12.520forest as a whole? What birds and what arboreal mammals are using these resources of nectar,
00:17:18.280of flowers, of fruits, of water that are collected and remain in the canopy that they might not find
00:17:24.140on the forest floor. If you isolate a tree in a pasture, for example, do the canopy organisms
00:17:30.080continue to function in isolation relative to other trees that remain in closed forests?
00:17:36.900So there's this huge array of unknown information about the species composition, the structure,
00:17:44.180the functioning and especially the response to disturbance that we have very little idea of.
00:17:50.880And I would love to see more people get involved with canopy research, publish their results,
00:17:56.620both in scientific papers and magazines for the lay audience, podcasts like this, so that people
00:18:02.660could really become more aware of the wonder of the canopy, as well as the ecological importance
00:18:08.840of canopy organisms that, as I said, my major professors just kind of underlooked, I guess,
00:18:14.860because they hadn't really considered the canopy as an integral part of the forest.
00:18:38.840And if I was one grain of corn, I'd wait till you did come along and throw me to the wind.
00:22:13.000Their roots do not go into the host tree itself, you know, pulling out water.
00:22:17.900I mean, there are parasitic plants that do that,
00:22:19.880but the majority of these plants that live in the canopy don't have roots that go into the tree,
00:22:24.380nor do they go down to the forest floor.
00:22:26.240But rather, they're dependent on atmospheric input, on rain,
00:22:30.300on what we call dry fall or dust falling down, or on mist.
00:22:33.700And every little rain droplet and mist droplet contains within it a tiny speck of particulate matter, you know, a bit of dust around which water vapor has condensed.
00:22:43.920That little tiny droplet gets bigger and bigger until it's heavy enough to actually drop out of the sky and fall as rain.
00:22:50.760So when you collect even rainwater from any place on Earth, even the most pristine, clean areas, if you were to take a beaker full of that water and do analysis of it,
00:22:59.700you'd find that there are amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus and calcium and magnesium and so forth
00:23:04.580dissolved in that rain. And that is what these canopy-dwelling plants live on. They're very good
00:23:10.060at intercepting and holding on to that rainwater and the nutrients that are contained inside it.
00:23:15.400So if you get changes in the rainfall regime, and especially if you get changes in the amount
00:23:22.800and duration of mist that comes into a forest, either in a place like where the redwoods grow
00:23:27.740or in a cloud forest where I work in Costa Rica, then it seems obvious that these plants are going
00:23:34.180to be starved or dried out as we get changes in the amount of mist and fog and rain that changes
00:23:40.620as a result of climate change. And that's exactly what we're finding, I know, in the cloud forests
00:23:44.980of Costa Rica and other places in the tropics, that the dry season, which has been traditionally
00:23:50.040through the ages been characterized by lots of wind-driven mist, the season is getting longer
00:23:55.700and longer and with fewer and fewer mist that's coming in. And so I was really concerned about
00:24:01.140that and sort of trying to figure out the science behind that back in 2004. And I did a project with
00:24:07.320a student of mine. And what we did was we said, well, you know, I felt like, well, I'm too old
00:24:11.900to wait for real climate change to actually take place and have an effect on these slow growing
00:24:16.180plants. So we need to do an experiment. And so what we did was cut mats of these canopy dwelling
00:24:22.040plants off of trees in the upper cloud forest where you get lots of mist and fog, and then
00:24:26.980transplant these mats of canopy-dwelling plants onto trees lower down on the mountain where there's
00:24:32.840now less mist and fog just because they're lower in elevation. So we were effectively doing a
00:24:38.180transplant experiment that exposed certain samples on trees that were lower in the community to less
00:24:44.180mist and fog, and then other samples up high on the mountain, which gets lots of mist and fog.
00:24:50.280And then over a year, we monitored the number of new leaves, the death of leaves and the
00:24:56.400And just to shorten the story, for all the four species that we did the experiment with,
00:25:01.400we found that the mats that were exposed to less mist and fog had significantly higher
00:25:06.640rates of mortality, produced fewer new leaves and died earlier.
00:25:11.340And so although this is an experimental setup that sort of allows us to fast forward to
00:25:16.620the future, what it tells us in a sort of horrible way is that, yes, climate change that drives
00:25:23.060lower amounts of mist, smaller amounts of rainfall is going to have a decidedly negative effect
00:25:29.160on these canopy dwelling plants. You know, as I think about climate change and how much it's
00:25:36.640affecting this amazing biodiversity in all of these forests, my mind goes to carbon sequestration.
00:25:43.700And that's part of the One Million Redwoods Project is wanting to sequester carbon with redwood trees and all of the understory plants in the soil to help try to mitigate climate change.
00:25:54.100And I would love if you could take us through how trees such as redwoods or the temperate rainforest in general are unparalleled at their ability to store carbon.
00:26:05.520And then if you could describe the different pools of carbon in forest ecosystems and perhaps how they interact from the soil to the terrestrial to the canopy.
00:26:15.060Well, I think, you know, describing the carbon cycle of a forest could probably take me the next three years on your podcast.
00:26:22.280and even then we wouldn't get to the end of it.
00:26:24.820But we can also describe it very simply.
00:26:26.860I mean, that basically all of the energy
00:26:29.260or nearly all of the energy of our Earth
00:26:47.880that require sort of a digestion of that sunlight,
00:26:51.000We can't use sunlight directly. Even when we get a suntan and we get browner, it doesn't mean that we're actually taking up energy from the sun. It means that we have to rely on plants like trees, redwoods, bromeliads, mosses, and so forth to convert that sunlight energy through the process of photosynthesis of taking carbon dioxide, water, and creating oxygen and stored energy sort of for all of us to make it in terms of meeting our energy needs.
00:27:19.820And so over the long time span of the evolution of green plants, what has evolved is that plants have become incredibly efficient converters and storers of that sunlight energy through photosynthesis into their leaves and other living parts and dead parts of their structures.
00:27:38.640and that that carbon that's manufactured in the leaf of a redwood will endure for some period of
00:27:45.040time, maybe from three to 10 years as a single needle or leaf. But at some point, it will age
00:27:51.140just like we do. It will abscise. That means there'll be sort of a line that occurs in response
00:27:56.780to sunlight and in terms of hormones. And that packet of carbon that's been stored in that leaf
00:28:02.180will fall to the forest floor, thanks to the presence of microbes that are able to decompose
00:28:07.200and move that carbon from the leaf into other forms,
00:28:11.100trees are then able to use those nutrients
00:28:31.920calcium carbonate deposits in a desert ecosystem?
00:28:35.140and how long has it been stored in oil reserves down far underneath the forest floor that was
00:28:40.760created during the Cretaceous. So when we think about carbon cycling, we have to think about not
00:28:45.620only how much is stored, how apparent it is, but how long will it be immobilized? How long will that
00:28:51.540carbon dioxide that's been taken out of the air, thanks to photosynthesis, how long will it be
00:28:56.800stored in a tree and kept out of going back out into the atmosphere to capture more sunlight,
00:29:02.440more heat and create global warming. And so when you think about a fast-growing tree in New England,
00:29:07.880for example, a maple tree that grows very quickly, it dies within 80 years and is recycled, that
00:29:13.760carbon is not staying immobilized very long. But when you look at a long-life tree like the redwoods
00:29:19.620that you're so protective of and trying to help along, I think that carbon is being stored for a
00:29:25.700much longer time period. So as we start thinking about strategies of storing carbon, getting it
00:29:32.840out of the atmosphere, holding onto it for as long as possible, those are the kinds of strategies
00:29:38.340that we have to think about as we design systems or modify systems and making the checks and
00:29:44.400balances of is it better to avoid putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere altogether rather
00:29:51.540than thinking, oh, it's already in the air and now we have to think about ways to take it out.
00:29:55.700So this idea of carbon cycling is sort of easy to explain when you have this theoretical kind of conceptual idea of how carbon is made, stored and moved around.
00:30:05.760But when you want to tweak the system to remove carbon dioxide, then there are a lot of other factors, both biological and social and cultural, that we have to think about in order to maximize the amount of carbon dioxide that's taken out of the atmosphere.
00:31:25.680You know, one part of me really is focused on mitigating climate change.
00:31:45.140The other part is very focused on biodiversity protection and enhancement.
00:31:50.280And one of your articles details seed banks in the canopy of Monteverde.
00:31:55.680where canopies are described as time capsules in which seeds can be removed in both space and
00:32:03.020time. And that's a quote. And it got me thinking about the possibility of unique genetics in
00:32:08.220hidden seeds stored in moss mats of the canopy here in the redwoods or elsewhere. Perhaps holding
00:32:15.860genetic diversity that was lost when temperate rainforests were pillaged by logging and
00:32:20.760degradation, maybe even with genes advantageous to our changing climate that could bring resilient
00:32:27.680diversity to the reduced gene pools in the wake of such pervasive destruction. And I'd love to
00:32:36.060hear your thoughts on that. So the concept of seed banks in the canopy is one of the few places where
00:32:42.180tropical rainforest research is ahead of or further developed than temperate rainforest
00:32:48.100research. We've done more research in temperate regions than we have in the tropics. But in this
00:32:52.580case, the study that I did was trying to understand the presence of seed banks really anywhere in the
00:32:58.620ecosystem, but in many aspects of regeneration of forests, in the tropics at least, rely on
00:33:04.800banks of seeds in the forest floor. That is, a tree makes hundreds, perhaps thousands of seeds
00:33:11.160that fall to the forest floor. Some of them decompose. Some of them are eaten by terrestrial
00:33:16.260mammals and moved away and destroyed. But some of them just stay there on the forest floor and get
00:33:21.340buried by subsequent layers of leaves. And many of them can remain dormant in the soil for decades
00:33:28.300and sometimes centuries. And when a gap opens up, that is when a tree falls over and there's
00:33:34.040sunlight that comes to the forest floor, these seeds say, hey, it's time to wake up. They can
00:33:39.340germinate. They start growing into the gap. And that's one way that a forest can regenerate.
00:33:44.040Well, you know, as you clear forests, for instance, in the tropical rainforest where I work in Costa Rica, a lot of that cloud forest has been converted to agricultural lands.
00:33:54.340That is, farmers have cut down forests, but very often they leave one or two or three trees in their pastures for shade for their cattle or because they think they're beautiful or the wood is no good anyway.
00:34:04.780so there's these communities that I described before of these living epiphytic canopy dwelling
00:34:10.500plants and that soil that is present underneath them and I thought well maybe that soil has
00:34:16.360seeds in them just like the terrestrial soil does and so my students and I cut off patches of these
00:34:23.600chunks of canopy soil we brought them into the lab we picked out the seeds we identified the
00:34:29.560seeds. And lo and behold, there was a bank of viable seeds in these pasture trees. And so we
00:34:35.460figured that if those exist as part of a viable seed bank, if a branch falls down and that soil
00:34:42.100and those seeds ride down that branch, there's a greater probability that then a primary rainforest
00:34:48.080plant is going to grow in the shade of that isolated pasture tree. Or if the tree falls over
00:34:53.620altogether, again, that is a seed bank that wasn't there before that might help or enhance
00:35:00.740the probability of the regeneration of the next generation of forests underneath these pasture
00:35:05.860trees. So we explored that. We published a paper on that. It's been followed up by other people who
00:35:11.420have been doing greenhouse experiments to make sure that these trees are viable, that they can
00:35:16.420actually grow, that they are protected by fences from being eaten by cows, that they can actually
00:35:22.220grow. And they actually call these isolated pasture trees regeneration nuclei. That is,
00:35:28.520that individual tree can serve as sort of an island of safety, an island of shade. And now
00:35:34.280we know an island of a repository of canopy seeds that wouldn't otherwise be there. I think a really
00:35:40.060promising area of research in the Pacific Northwest would be to do the same kinds of studies that
00:35:45.160we've been doing in Costa Rica, but with these legacy trees that are left in clear cuts to serve
00:35:51.540as a seed source for the next generation of trees, but to actually try to quantify that
00:35:57.100bank of seeds that are in the canopy soils that might be used as the tree branches fall
00:36:03.860or the trees as a whole fall, or animals visiting the canopy of that isolated tree might take
00:36:10.000chunks of that soil or seeds themselves and disperse them to other areas.
00:36:13.960So that's another example, I think, of an area of forest canopy ecology that we've just
00:36:20.240barely scratched the surface and would really benefit from more scrutiny, more investigation.
00:36:27.760Oh, that's incredible. I'm so excited by that topic. And it reminds me fungi in these canopies
00:36:36.720as well. And there's so many that are not understood. And I'm wondering, along with
00:36:44.600these seeds that are left in the canopies, what are some of the lessons from the fungi in these
00:36:51.800canopies that are also extremely biodiverse and perhaps have a similar way of helping to restore
00:36:59.220certain ecosystems and also have more research directed towards them?
00:37:05.200You've hit on probably the part of canopy ecology that is the most poorly known,
00:37:10.040and that is canopy fungi. And when I was putting together a textbook with a colleague of mine
00:37:15.180called Forest Canopies about 10 years ago, you know, we had somebody who could write a chapter
00:37:19.860about the canopy plants, the canopy birds, the canopy soils, the canopy microorganisms,
00:37:26.200canopy conservation. We couldn't find any scientist that could actually write a chapter
00:37:32.340about canopy fungi because there simply wasn't enough, there isn't enough sort of basic research
00:37:37.700that's been done to even try to integrate or synthesize what is known and what needs to be
00:37:42.500done. So all I can say is it's very rare to encounter fruiting bodies, you know, the
00:37:47.620basidiomyces, the mushrooms, you don't see those in the canopy, but we know that there are fungi
00:37:52.420there. For instance, some of the work that I've done with a graduate student of mine, Kai Rains,
00:37:58.120we looked at the roots of several of the genera of these canopy dwelling plants, plants in the
00:38:04.340Piper family, the pepper family, and also the plants in the blueberry family, the ericaceae.
00:38:09.880And they collected roots. They did the preparation to see whether or not there was a fungal component
00:38:14.540and also looked at the physical structures of the roots there. And they ascertained that those
00:38:19.740plants are indeed mycorrhizal, that they have this fungal root interaction that allows them to
00:38:26.180take greater advantage of the water and the nutrients in the soil, in this case, the canopy
00:38:31.280soil, but that by whatever means, the spores and propagules of the fungi that are specific to that
00:38:37.620mycorrhizal interaction are indeed up in the canopy. But who they are and what they look like
00:38:43.640and what conditions they grow and vest and how specific they are to particular species of vascular
00:38:50.120plants, those questions are wide open. And to me, that means that it's both super exciting and
00:38:57.460super frustrating, super exciting because there's lots of questions to ask and answer,
00:39:02.040but super frustrating because there still are so many missing pieces of this jigsaw puzzle of
00:39:08.180rainforests that have not been answered so that we can't even yet describe patterns,
00:39:12.800much less make predictions about what might happen in the face of global climate change
00:39:17.580or more land conversion to agricultural land, because we're missing these basic pieces of
00:39:22.620biology that are so necessary to really soundly understand what's going on in an ecosystem
00:39:29.680on the ground or up a tree you never know quite where they'll be oh i will put you in my mushroom
00:39:43.060basket sorted carefully in my mushroom basket i will put you in my mushroom basket
00:39:52.580So don't try to hide, don't try to hide
00:40:17.280Well, now that you've taken us through the seed banks and the canopies and the fungi, I would now love to delve a little deeper into the epiphytes of the canopy, more specifically the mosses, which really steal my heart.
00:40:32.900And these beings are so often overlooked and understudied, but as one of the most ancient plant lineages on Earth, we have a thing or two to learn from them.
00:40:43.880And I've heard that the gathering of wild moss is for commercial uses in some temperate rainforest in the Pacific Northwest and Appalachia to be called the, quote, botanical equivalent of strip mining.
00:40:55.340And in one of your publications, you reference that the U.S. floral industry alone consumes up to 37 million dry kilograms of moss each year, 24,000 semi-trucks worth of moss.
00:41:09.700so with so much of the earth's biological tapestry unraveling and human injustice these are the
00:41:17.540ecological stories that just aren't being told but mosses too are sentient life forms that deserve
00:41:23.520a place in the wild web of the forest and not only do they deserve life but they also play a
00:41:28.980critical role in healthy dynamics of forest so could you speak about the ecological role of
00:41:34.860epiphytes and mosses in the temperate rainforest and perhaps the cloud forest as well
00:41:39.580and help us understand why over-harvesting is detrimental to the entire forest web.
00:41:46.420Sure. Well, again, this is not as well-researched as I would like, but we know for sure that these
00:41:52.600mosses that grow, I'll just speak about the temperate rainforest at this point,
00:41:56.300where the moss harvesting is most prevalent, that the mosses are really important from an
00:42:00.220ecosystem standpoint. As I mentioned, they're very efficient at taking up water from mist and rain
00:42:06.180and the nutrients that are contained in those droplets of rain and mist, incorporating it into
00:42:11.340their own biomass, sequestering as well carbon from the air that we talked about earlier with
00:42:16.500respect to climate change. But they also create habitat that is important, if not sort of uniquely
00:42:23.260necessary for invertebrates. That canopy soil, if I were to bring down a chunk of it to you on the
00:42:28.520forest floor, and we looked at it under a microscope, would be just crawling with all
00:42:33.280kinds of insects and with spiders, ants, beetles, earwigs, sowbugs, species very often that are
00:42:40.100restricted to the canopy and never seen on the forest floor. And the same is true of the
00:42:44.460microorganisms. So they're little islands of biodiversity. Again, if they didn't exist,
00:42:50.540if they're stripped off and they don't regenerate, then that habitat is lost for those organisms as
00:42:56.260well. Many birds use epiphytic mosses for their nests, not only to line the nests, but also to
00:43:01.840serve as camouflage. Arboreal mammals are also known to nest there. The marble muralette itself,
00:43:07.080one of our sadly endangered and most amazing birds of the Pacific Northwest, doesn't actually
00:43:12.080make a nest of moss, but it sort of creates a small depression on the moss bolsters of old
00:43:18.220growth Douglas fir trees of coastal trees and coastal forests. So it's using that moss as a
00:43:24.020nest. It's very well camouflaged, which allows it to avoid predation as chicks. And so these mosses,
00:43:30.300as you said, are really quiet inhabitants of the temperate rainforest. They take a very long time
00:43:36.120to regenerate. I did some experiments way back in, gosh, starting in 1996, where I started
00:43:42.200stripping mosses and the canopy soils from trees. The strips were about a meter long, about three
00:43:47.900feet long. And I thought, oh, well, you know, everything's so lush up here. They'll just grow
00:43:51.760back. You know, they'll encroach from the side and just take over. I would probably won't even
00:43:55.520be able to tell where I stripped them off. So I came back the next year, no mosses, next year,
00:44:01.060next year. It wasn't until 22 years later that I began seeing these mosses recolonizing. And now
00:44:09.040even 30 years later, they're really not back to their original density and the same composition.
00:44:15.880So when you strip these mosses off of trees and branches, even though it looks like they're so
00:44:21.440lush and they're so happy there, these species are fragile and they take a very long time to
00:44:27.780regenerate. And that's one of the reasons I began thinking about, well, as I was thinking about and
00:44:33.080learning about the moss harvesting business and how it was spreading and how they were collecting
00:44:37.920mosses in national parks and national forests in the Northwest. And based on Pat Muir's fantastic
00:44:42.980work with really documenting this, I thought that maybe one way that we could ameliorate this
00:44:47.980situation would be not to set up guards and stop people from harvesting them, but to actually learn
00:44:55.480how to grow mosses so we could farm them so that we wouldn't have to strip them out of the wild
00:45:00.060old growth forest. And I thought that maybe inmates, prisoners could help me with this process
00:45:04.900because I didn't happen to have students at that time. So I went to a local prison and I talked to
00:45:10.260the superintendent and I said, I'd really like to learn how to grow these mosses and could your
00:45:14.880inmates help me. And after quite a long time of negotiations, that's what turned out they did.
00:45:19.880We brought bags of mosses from the Olympic Peninsula. We taught them how to tell the four
00:45:24.180different species apart. They created these racks out of old recycled wood. And for 18 months,
00:45:29.560they took care of those mosses and they figured out ways of helping to make them grow. And so
00:45:35.140after 18 months, I had my answer about which mosses grow fastest. What are the sort of
00:45:39.940horticultural ways that we can encourage moss growth. And they benefited from, you know,
00:45:44.580working with these living things, which they don't have an opportunity to do when they're
00:45:48.440incarcerated. And the superintendent loved it because the men started having better social
00:45:53.220interactions and being more curious about mosses and biology and science and science education.
00:45:58.980And so we've continued that project, not just moss growing, but captive rearing endangered
00:46:03.240species of frogs and butterflies, starting a science lecture series in prisons, not only in
00:46:08.500Washington state, but now across the country. And so that phenomenon, that really misguided
00:46:14.800industry of collecting wild mosses has had a good part to it in that it has sort of created this
00:46:22.220opportunity instead of human interactions that has benefited those people who I think kind of
00:46:28.200need it most, that is exposure to nature, exposure to education, people who are incarcerated,
00:46:33.060but also to the scientists and conservationists who have been involved with now working with the
00:46:37.840incarcerated and realizing that this is a symbiosis in a way, a set of connections,
00:46:43.480both biological and cultural and social and economic and spiritual, I think, that tells
00:46:48.800us about the power of working with nature, whether it's mosses or trees or butterflies
00:46:53.720or frogs that all of us can benefit from.
00:46:58.620There's so much to the stripping of mosses and how long they take to regenerate is heartbreaking
00:47:06.040because mosses are just for me one of the most spectacular parts of forests and old growth
00:47:13.080forests but then to learn that you have been researching how to grow them on top of being
00:47:20.360able to go into these prisons where there is a lack of connection to nature and working with
00:47:28.520living beings and with these men that have been incarcerated allowing them to be a part of the
00:47:36.020process that's so regenerative in so many ways and I really just want to thank you for your work
00:47:43.780that supported the mutual healing of earth and society in a really unique way I'm curious you
00:47:49.720know what kind of effect have you seen on the inmates what kind of feedback have you heard from
00:47:55.480them well boy that's a whole other interview but I can say in just a few words it's transformative
00:48:02.020it's transformative in that they I think what has been expressed through surveys interviews
00:48:08.400and just sort of hanging out with them when they work in a garden when they work with beekeeping
00:48:13.220when they work with the frogs when they work with the butterflies when they see the transformation
00:48:17.140of an egg of a butterfly to a caterpillar to this beautiful thing that can fly I think there's also
00:48:25.040a sense of identity connecting with that with the dynamic of the possibility of change the
00:48:31.600possibility of metamorphosis and transformation. And if you're, you know, an inmate who's been
00:48:36.280imprisoned for nine years, where you're separated from your wife and your kids, you know, where's
00:48:41.460the hope? Where's the hope that you can possibly find? When you think about the barriers that
00:48:46.340happen when you get out and people don't want to hire a felon, or you don't have the money for
00:48:50.960renting a good place or any of that, you know, where is the hope? And so I think what our programs
00:48:57.100have done is provide some hope, is allow the nature that they're nurturing, literally
00:49:03.040seeing transformations, seeing that they're capable of success in nurturing, which maybe they
00:49:09.940themselves have never been nurtured before. And that's one of the reasons they're in prison
00:49:13.320is what I see as the outcome of this. Yes, it's great to get these endangered species that we
00:49:18.760then release to the wild. But the real work, the real outcome is about that individual inmate who
00:49:25.060faces such difficulties in his or her life moving forward, both in the prison and outside the
00:49:31.280prison, I think that contact with nature, as we know, in an immediate sense, creates a sense of
00:49:37.020calm, a reduction of anxiety and stress. But even more so, again, that word spirituality we talked
00:49:43.780about first, that sense of connection, connection to the frog or the moss that is being cared for,
00:49:48.720but also a connection to the outside, a connection to saying, I'm doing something that's bigger than
00:49:53.700me, that's bigger than this damn prison, that's bigger than my family, that's as big as planet0.89
00:49:58.340earth, because I'm helping nature regenerate itself. And to me, that's what these programs0.97
00:50:05.620are about. And it's been a very interesting journey for me to see the connections, again,
00:50:11.240the spiritual, intellectual, social connections that I started out with just looking at the
00:50:18.600biological interactions of canopy plants and their trees and the forest, writing all these
00:50:23.600scientific papers, having all these graduate students, and slowly evolving, slowly changing,
00:50:29.240slowly transforming myself into understanding that, hey, wait a minute, you can't think about
00:50:34.320tropical rainforests these days without thinking about those farmers in the pastures who are
00:50:38.840isolating these trees. You can't think about that farmer without the context of what's going on with
00:50:44.060the economy of Costa Rica. You can't think about our society without thinking about prisoners who
00:50:49.340have been incarcerated for most of their adult life. They're part of our society, too. And so
00:50:54.400I feel that I've been really fortunate in being able to have witnessed and actually helped weave
00:51:00.560this tapestry of science and society in the most general of ways and the most specific of ways.
00:51:07.120And that is what I try to offer to people I encounter, whether it's my graduate students or
00:51:12.700whether it's some inmate at a prison, that in fact, there are threads that indeed do connect
00:51:17.960us to each other and to nature. And let's see how we can make those threads stronger.
00:51:24.060Oh my goodness, Nalini, I admire you so much. I mean, if we only talked about canopy species,
00:51:33.780I would have been completely mesmerized and intrigued by your knowledge. But the fact that
00:51:42.020you bring in the intersectionality of so many pieces of this puzzle that we're all trying to
00:51:49.800work through right now it is just incredible who you are and how you show up in the world
00:51:55.420with your full self and your heart that is clearly so expansive from the mosses to the fungi
00:52:03.820to humans and incarcerated humans and and how that all interplays together and like you said
00:52:09.180the farmers of Costa Rica, of course, affected by the economy of Costa Rica and how this domino
00:52:15.060effect changes all of us and either uplifts us or distracts us from the work or even keeps us
00:52:24.440from being able to be present or helpful. I mean, that is a whole other interview in and of itself,
00:52:30.960but I just want to just acknowledge how deeply connected you are and let alone your passion
00:52:38.120about so many things and building bridges beyond the scientific community. And it's wonderful
00:52:44.960because that scientific community and the knowledge tends to be inaccessible and elitist
00:52:51.140and insular to most people, and especially people who don't identify with academia or don't have
00:52:56.640the opportunity to go to college or whatever reasons. And I guess as we're coming to the end
00:53:03.260of our interview, I would just like to ask you to share with the audience how you're endeavoring to
00:53:10.040make the teachings of the forest accessible to all, and maybe just being able to round out this
00:53:15.620interview with what you're working on now, what is most important to you, and how can people
00:53:23.000support your work, or are there areas that you feel that are really important for people to get
00:53:29.480involved in? Oh, wow. I guess now at this stage of my life, I mean, I'm 63 years old. I've been
00:53:36.960a scientist and a professor for more than 30 years. I've lived in different parts of the country. I've
00:53:42.880done field work in different parts of the world. I feel I'm now at a stage where I'm allowed to,
00:53:48.780and I'm capable maybe of pulling together these threads, the threads of science, threads of the
00:53:54.000arts, the threads of the humanities, the threads of human needs, especially humans who have been
00:54:00.420in bad places for my 15 years of work in prisons. And I think now I'm allowed and able to try to
00:54:08.340weave them together, to think about life and its interpretation as a tapestry, where each thread
00:54:15.200is pure, you know, a green thread, a red thread. I love the purity of science. I love the purity of
00:54:21.860faith-based people and how directed and singular they can be about their faith. I love the purity
00:54:29.320of the arts of an artist who just is so great at singing opera. And then you can bring her into
00:54:35.880the canopy of a tree and she can sing an opera about the forest canopy. And so what I'm seeing
00:54:41.600is the possibility and the need for interweaving these threads. And unfortunately, our society is
00:54:48.760often about separating threads. You know, you take your English class, your math class, your
00:54:53.380geography class, you know, your history class, and then somehow you're supposed to put those all
00:54:58.280together maybe to solve problems. And it's clear from our world right now that we need all those
00:55:05.060different threads. I mean, it's very, very rare to find a societal problem that's just one color
00:55:10.560or could be solved by a thread of one color. So I think where I'm going now is taking what I've
00:55:15.920done before in science and continue to do. I'm very fortunate and I'm leaving the day after
00:55:20.940tomorrow for three months in Costa Rica to do field work. So I'm carrying on the science thread,
00:55:25.820but I've also been able to add these other threads of the incarcerated, of the arts, of
00:55:31.920thinking about conservation in this sense of connectedness. And then, you know, to create
00:55:38.140this tapestry of how science and society, how nature and humans work together. And I'm still
00:55:44.460not certain what the loom is. You know, I'm still like looking around. I've been using academia as
00:55:49.240my loom, but maybe there's some other loom that will allow me to lay the woof and the weft of
00:55:54.960these different colored threads together to more efficiently and effectively make something that's
00:55:59.680like a tapestry that's, you know, beautiful and complex and connected and yet fragile too. And so
00:56:05.580I guess that's what I'm up to these days is searching for the loom that will allow me to
00:56:11.820weave these different, diverse, beautiful threads together to make something of use.
00:56:18.160Well, I just want to again, thank you, Nalini, for all that you have done and given back to
00:56:26.860the earth. It's mind blowing and inspiring and just gives me so much energy. And honestly,
00:56:34.680I just want to get to know you more. I'm like, who is this person? You are just so incredible.
00:56:41.820especially as a scientist, because science holds so much power and so much influence
00:56:49.140in today's world. And many scientists are not putting all of the pieces together.
00:56:56.180I wish you could see my face right now. It is smiling from ear to ear, knowing that
00:57:01.180someone like you is out there doing the work that you are doing and influencing others along the way.
00:57:08.140So thank you so much for this interview and this time that we spent together, and I hope that we will find each other in a tree somewhere at some point, hugging each other and hugging the tree at the same time and just singing opera to the mosses.
00:57:23.800That is exactly what I want to do for 2018.