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Good to know

Good to know

Gut zu wissen

Gut zu wissen

Extra tips

Extra tips

Carbon sequestration in soils and climate change mitigation - Definitions and pitfalls

Abstract

• Carbon sequestration is a potentially misleading buzzword
• “It’s mostly used wrongly”, which implies that they are going to propose the right way to do it here
• It’s not just about stocks
• other potential concepts: loss mitigation, negative emissions, climate change mitigation, C storage, C accrual

A hectare of trees is needed just to get one squirrel through the winter

A Scots pine seed looks a bit like the wing of an insect, with a hard seed case and a long papery wing acting like a sail to catch the breeze. The seed endosperm crop is an essential food source for crossbills, siskins, tits, woodpeckers and red squirrels. Red squirrels shred the scales to get at the seeds, eating up to 200 cones a day. A hectare of trees is needed just to get one squirrel through the winter. […] Rodents and insects love pine seeds so a forest must produce a seed crop larger than the appetites of the rest of the food chain if it wants its seedlings to stand a chance. This seems to be the reason behind synchronous mast years - when all the trees produce a spectacular crop of seed at the same time.

Scots pines synchronise their flowering over 200 miles

Not only do Scots pines give their pollen the best possible start in life, they also synchronise their flowering across distances of up to 200 miles. How do they know? Ecologists have suggested hormonal communication on the wind, as well as via fungal networks underground, or it could be a deeply embedded genetic trigger activated by certain climatic thresholds. But no one really knows yet.

Ferns and mosses will grow with global warming

In Siberia rampant moss is already hindering the establishment of larch seedlings. The accumulation of carbon dioxide acidifies the soil, in the same way that CO$_2$ acidifies the ocean, suffocation other plants.

Implied violoence of brutalist forest architecture

The palette of the hill is red with moss, pink from the granite, bright green with shoots of blaeberry, the orange and red and white of lichen, all set against the blanket grey of heavy rainclouds pressing down. Below me the forest is an unending green, punctuated by trucks on the highway and the iron grey of the River Spey looping through the trees. Far off are the bare burned-brown grouse moors and the geometric blocks of plantations that now appear to me to have all the implied violence of brutalist concrete architecture.

Trees can see and hear

Monoterpenes are volatile organic chemicals produced by pines that the trees use to send signals to each other - to deter herbivores or insects or to coordinate seed release. Monoterpenes are tiny molecules that carry pine scent and bounce sunlight back into space. When pines are metabolising in sunlight there can be as many as 1000-2000 particles per cubic centimetre in the air around the tree, reducing the amount of solar radiation hitting the earth. Via the density of the chemical signal and the availability of light, they can detect the presence of other trees. In fact, they see the space in polygons, growing away from their neighbours and towards the light, creating a five-sided tesselation in the canopy that is the basis of self-organisation in the forest${}^{10}$. Through the structure of their cells, trees can capture reverberations and ‘hear’ sounds around them as well as ultrasound far away${}^{11}$. Pines can detect the familiar presence of rustling needles or the crack of a falling tree, and of course they communicate and look after each other through the rich mycorrhizal network underground. Scots pines have one of the most developed fungal networks in the soil, with over nineteen known ecto-mycorrhizal relationships for sharing carbon, nitrogen, eseential acids and other nutrients.