Transcript: NALINI NADKARNI on Discovering Forest Canopy Microcosms /215
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Ayana Young Welcome to For The Wild Podcast, I’m Ayana Young. This week we are rebroadcasting our interview with Nalini Nadkarni, initially released in December of 2017. In this conversation, Nalini and I journey into majestic forest canopies. We hope you enjoy this special encore episode.
Hello and welcome to For The Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana Young. Today we are speaking with Dr. Nalini Nadkarni, who is a forest ecologist and a science communicator. She was a faculty member at the Evergreen State College for 20 years, and in 2011 joined the University of Utah as a professor of biology and Director of the Center for Science and Mathematics Education. She received her B.S. Degree from Brown University and her PhD from the University of Washington. Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, and Aldo Leopold Leadership Fellowship, the 2011 NSF Public Service Award and the 2012 AAS award for Public Engagement. And the 2013 car medal for conservation. Her research concerns the ecological roles of canopy dwelling biota in forest ecosystems. She has published over 100 scientific articles and four scholarly books. Welcome, Nalini, we are so excited to have you and explore forest ecology and canopy with you.
Nalini Nadkarni Thanks. I'm glad to be here.
Ayana Young Well, I'm so delighted because I really feel like we share a sense of kinship, the similar kinship with the trees in the forest. I 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. And I just am so grateful for all you do and service to these magnificent trees and forests and the biodiversity that spirals from them. It's just amazing to think about all of the biodiversity that is in the crowns that most people are unaware of. The redwoods are considered one of the most structurally complex trees on Earth, they harbor entire unique ecosystems in their canopies, thick mats of moss and ferns, insects, the endangered marbled murrelet, the threatened cloud salamander, fungi, you know, just the thought of these canopy beings, fills my heart with excitement. So, you know, you have climbed many of these trees on four different continents and ventured many times into the tops of the Monteverde, cloud forests of Costa Rica and the temperate rainforests of Washington State. So I would just love it 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.
Nalini Nadkarni Well, first of all, I thank you for that introduction. And I would really love to take every one of your listeners up into a real journey up into a real tree. But 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, when you move from the dark, damp still forest floor, whether you're in the temperate rainforests of Washington or the tropical rainforests of Costa Rica, and 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, a vista rather than being enclosed. And so let's start at the bottom, let's put on our climbing gear. I'm a forest canopy researcher, who uses mountain climbing techniques to get up into tall trees. Other canopy colleges use construction cranes, hot air balloons, canopy walkways, and most recently drones as well to try to explore the forest canopy.
But 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. I 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. And so there's this sort of feeling of expectation, of curiosity of exploration, as you put on your climbing gear, with a regular harness, you have ascenders like dumar ascenders. Of course you always have a safety line and you get ready to really ascend into the upper canopy.
I'll just sort of preface that with a question that comes up which is like, how do you get the rope up there to begin with, and people use crossbows to shoot up like a fishing line up high into the trees that goes up and over a branch and then comes down to the forest floor. You tie a line onto that, a parachute cord onto that and pull that up. Then you tie a climbing rope onto that parachute cord and pull that up and over the branch, tie one end off onto the trunk and then you have a nice safe secure anchor so you can climb to the other side of the rope to get up into the canopy. I invented something called a master caster, which is just a metal rod that has a slingshot attached to one side and a fishing reel beneath that, it's of course much easier to get across international borders than a giant crossbow. So that has served me well.
But once the line is up and over, and once our climbing gear is on, what we can do is basically slowly sort of inch worm up the the rope itself and as you move up from the forest floor, which is usually very dark because of all of the intervening vegetation, the leaves, the stems, the branches, and so forth, that absorb most of the sunlight. In fact, only about 2% of the sunlight that strikes the forest canopy actually makes its way down to the forest floor. But as you start climbing, you sort of get intimate with a trunk, you start seeing the trunk is this really solid entity and as you climb up, of course it narrows, the branches sort of take off and you start seeing the architecture of the tree itself. Sometimes you can kind of read the body language of the tree, you see a twisted branch or a missing branch. And you can understand that these trees are not just fixed entities in terms of their size and shape, but rather respond to the environment as they grow and record those pressures with their own wood and leaves as you move up. As you get up to about 30 or 40 feet and start looking down on the ground, you realize you're really gaining a different perspective than what you had on the forest floor. I noticed this, especially when I'm climbing into the temperate rainforests of the Olympic Peninsula. And you know, those sword ferns that are just sort of growing all over the ground when you look down on them from 30 feet above them. You see, they're really like green starfish. They're these radially symmetrical organisms that you don't quite appreciate their structure when you're actually looking at them from the ground.
So you begin to see shapes and forms, colors and relationships within the three dimensional volume of the forest that's really impossible to appreciate when you're sitting on the forest floor. Anyway, as you ascend you begin, especially if you're in a wet forest like the temperate rainforests of Washington state or the tropical cloud forests of Monteverde, Costa Rica, you start seeing these epiphytes, these plants that grow upon the branches of the tree. In the temperate rainforest, you see mosses and lichens, and liverworts. The living plants in Costa Rica are much more diverse. You get bromeliads and ferns and orchids and blueberry bushes and all kinds of things that are living in the forest canopy there. And one of the things I have found most interesting is beneath these living plants on the branches of the trees, there's an accumulation of canopy soil as they die and decompose. They actually create a soil that they root themselves. The roots don't go into the tree itself. But you realize as you're sort of hanging on your rope, looking at this mini ecosystem of the canopy, that all of the elements of a big ecosystem that living plants, the mosses and even the soils and microorganisms are present in these little canopy ecosystems. And so for me that's been an intriguing piece of ascending into the canopy is seeing that these are not just one or two little isolated plants that live up there that are visited by isolated animals or birds, but rather they constitute their own living system. And my questions have really been about how does this mini living system of the forest tree tops interact with the forest as a whole. And so when we get up into the forest canopy itself when we sit on the highest branches, and look out at the view of the forest from the top rather than the bottom, when we see birds moving from one tree top to another, or howler monkeys calling from the tree next door, or just sort of a nest of little bromeliads that are living their little lives up in these canopies soils high above the forest floor. We realize then that this is really an opportunity to think about how holistic a forest is, how connected it is. And yet it's still made out of these subcomponents, these little micro ecosystems that can get as small as a single microorganism or a single molecule of nitrogen and carbon, and yet somehow it all works together as a whole. And I guess I sometimes when I arrive to the top of the tree and if you were sitting next to me, I might have a conversation more about spirituality than about biology because I think that biologically and from the standpoint of the human spirit, getting and living and thinking about the tree canopy is really all about connections, which is something I think that all of us feel when we walk beneath the crowns of redwood forest or a lowland tropical forest, or any sort of forest that we sent that really what it's about is connections
Ayana Young It's interesting to think about the connections of the canopy to the forest floor and just how unique both of these ecosystems are yet they're within the same community and it's just incredible to hear the experience that you've had time and time again of starting at the floor and working your way up climbing into these trees and the wonder and the spirituality that you're talking about, just this overwhelming connection to this place. And you had mentioned that back in the 80s, the canopies were the next frontier, or maybe even the last frontier, how much is still unknown about the ecological dynamics and biodiversity of forest canopies? And what are some of the pieces that you have been learning that have really shifted knowledge?
Nalini Nadkarni Well, those are great questions. Maybe I'll start with a second question first, which is, what have I discovered that was unknown before I and my colleagues went up there and I can tell you that, you know, really, I mean, this is hard to believe now if you're a canopy scientist, or like my young graduate students who are just doing canopy research as if it's sort of the most normal thing to do, but 35 years ago, when I was starting out there really literally were very few people who were doing this. And I remember the first time I went to a tropical rainforest on a tropical field course in Costa Rica, and I looked up in the canopy, and I'm like, "Oh, my God, look at all those plants up there." And, you know, my professors just couldn't answer questions about what was going on up there. So I came back to Seattle, to the College of Forestry and I got my committee together. And I said, You know, I really want to study the forest canopy. And they looked at me sort of like I was cuckoo, or not a scientist, because they said, "Well, you know, Nalini, the canopy is just really part of the forest. And with so many questions on the forest floor, you don't really need to get up into the forest canopy." And I really reacted against that. And for some reason, I felt confident about this, almost, I guess, an instinct or something or intuition, that in fact, I did want to go up to the canopy that I did need to go up into the canopy to understand the forest as a whole that we were missing pieces of the jigsaw puzzle if we didn't go up there to study it. And I think, you know, I could sort of have taken the lead from marine biology. Just that when the scuba gear was invented, when biologists could spend hours and hours down in the lower parts of the ocean, they began making discoveries that were never possible if they stayed up in their boats on the surface of the ocean.
And so I began with some of the most basic questions that can be asked about an ecosystem, which is, you know, "How much material is up there? Who's up there? What are the species? How much does it weigh? What's the nutrient content of this stuff? How much does it circulate? When the stuff falls down? Does it decompose and get taken up by trees? What's its role in the ecosystem cycles of the forest as a whole?" But if you want to start answering those kinds of questions, you still have to answer very basic pieces of it. And again, nobody had really studied anything basic about this. So I just started out by saying, "Well, how much stuff is up there? How many mosses? How much does this stuff weigh relative to the rest of the ecosystem?”
And as I went out to the Olympic Rainforest and climate, these big leaf maple trees that are very dominant in the river bottoms of the four major rivers of the Olympic Peninsula on the west side, I would peel away these mats of moss and the underlying canopy soils. And I kept seeing these roots, large roots, small roots, woody roots, clearly not the roots of mosses because mosses don't have roots, you know, they have these little tiny rhizoid things that aren't like woody plant roots at all. And so I took samples and I brought them back to my major professor and I said, you know, "Hey, Chuck, what's with these roots in the canopy?" And he said, "What are you talking about," you know, and I said, "Well, there are roots up in the canopy that I've been climbing" and he said, "I don't think you know what you're talking about." So I rented a chainsaw. And I actually, you know, went up to the canopy and sought out these, the source of the roots which were at the crotches of these large branches and the trunk, brought them back to my major professor and I said, "These are the roots I'm talking about." And he had never heard of it. But these are canopy roots. They're produced by the trees themselves that snake underneath the mats of live and dead organic mats of the canopy soils I talked about and the tree itself is capable of taking nutrients and water up from the very mosses and canopy soils that they're supporting.
And so I realized then that this was kind of a never discovered phenomenon, that in fact, trees were kind of serving as the landlords to these mosses, but they were gaining a benefit from the presence of those mosses and soils. And so the whole kind of paradigm of nutrient cycling that people had sort of accepted before that fallen leaves and fallen mosses have to fall to the forest floor before trees could take advantage of them and take those nutrients up- I was able to sort of explode that because we were suddenly documenting that, in fact, nutrient transfer, nutrient uptake, water uptake, can take place within the crown of a tree, which people just sort of hadn't realized that complexity of the nutrient cycles. So that sort of gave me first of all, a wonderful sense of discovery, but also it gave me and other canopy researchers this sense that "Wow, there really is a lot to see up there that we don't know on the forest floor processes as well as species."
And so to go now to your first question about, you know what remains unknown. While there's a tremendous amount of knowledge that we need to get in terms of what species are up there, are there species that are specialized to the forest canopy and that you would never see on the forest floor? Are there micro environments and micro niches and micro substrates that favor one species to grow, but it may not grow somewhere else even within a single tree crown. What is the role of these tree tops in terms of intercepting rain and the nutrients that are contained in raindrops in terms of the wellbeing of the forest as a whole? What birds and what are boreal mammals are using these resources of nectar, of flowers, of fruits, of water that are collected and remain in the canopy, that they might not find on the forest floor. If you isolate a tree in a pasture, for example, does the canopy organism continue to function in isolation relative to other trees that remain in closed forest. So there's this huge array of unknown information about the species composition, the structure, the functioning, and especially the response to disturbance that we have very little idea of and I would love to see more people get involved with canopy research, publish their results, both in scientific papers and magazines for the lay audience, podcasts like this, so that people could really become more aware of the wonder of the canopy, as well as the ecological importance of canopy organisms that, as I said, my major professors just kind of underlooked I guess, because they hadn't really considered the canopy as an integral part of the forest.
Ayana Young Where I live, it wasn't necessarily clearcut, many seed trees were left and I think wow, okay, these seed trees may have kept some of their canopy diversity since they weren't cut, but then what happened when all of the other species around them were flattened to the ground? And what happened to, you know, the interplay between different trees.
Gosh, just all of the diversity and the endemic species that can only survive in canopies and how we've been dealing with logging, but now with climate change, and how that's affecting them, and I'm sure there are species that are barely holding on at this time, some that we may not even know yet that we don't even know we're losing and how they affect the rest of the species in the community of the forest canopy and the other list goes on and on. And I am really excited because I get to go into these canopies a few times in 2018 and actually having these reciprocity retreats where people who are helping to support Redwood Reforestation, I'm taking small groups into old growth forests to explore these canopies and learn and hopefully support the survival of some of these kin. So just hearing you speak on the wonder and just the spiritual element and how much it fills us. But then how we can reciprocate this wonder and this fulfillment we get by actually doing something to support them by finding the research and learning more and supporting other researchers so that we can know exactly what we need to protect it and potentially take that further into policy and all that. But I touched a little bit on climate change and what kind of effect that's having on the canopies. And I imagine that canopy plants have already begun to respond to increased levels of carbon dioxide, perhaps with at least temporary increased growth levels. And I know here in the Redwoods, you know, I'm really concerned about the decrease in fog, which I think is already happening. And Redwoods are highly adapted to rely on fog as a water source. I've heard you expressed similar concerns on cloud forests of Costa Rica. So I'm wondering, do you have any predictions for how canopy forests will fare in rapid climate change?
Nalini Nadkarni Yeah, that is a great question. And I think a number of scientists have put forward this idea that canopy dwelling plants are sort of the canaries in the coal mine of climate change because they live in the canopy, their roots do not go into the host tree itself, you know, pulling out water into, I mean, there are parasitic plants that do that. But the majority of these plants that live in the canopy don't have roots that go into the tree, nor do they go down to the forest floor, but rather they're dependent on atmospheric input, on rain, on what we call dry fall, or dust falling down, or on mist, and 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, that little tiny droplet gets bigger and bigger until it's heavy enough to actually drop out of the sky and fall as rain. So 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, you find that there are amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus and calcium and magnesium and so forth, dissolved in that rain. And that is what these canopy dwelling plants live on. They're very good at intercepting and holding on to that rainwater and the nutrients that are contained inside it.
So if you get changes in the rainfall regime, and especially if you get changes in the amount and duration of mist that comes into a forest, either in a place like where the redwoods grow or in a cloud forest where I work in Costa Rica, then it seems obvious that these plants are going to be starved or dried out, as we get changes in the amount of mist and fog and rain that changes as a result of climate change. And that's exactly what we're finding. I know in the cloud forests of Costa Rica and other places in the tropics that the dry season, which has been traditionally through the ages been characterized by lots of wind driven mist, the season is getting longer and longer, and with fewer and fewer mist that's coming in. And so I was really concerned about that, and sort of trying to figure out the science behind that back in 2004, and I did a project with a student of mine, and what we did was, we said, "Well, you know, I felt like well, I'm too old to wait for a real climate change to actually take place and have an effect on these slow growing plants. So we need to do an experiment." And so what we did was cut mats of these canopy dwelling plants off of trees in the upper cloud forest. Where'd you get lots of mist and fog and then transplant these mats of canopy blowing plants onto trees lower down on the mountain where there's now less mist and fog just because they're lower in elevation. So we were effectively doing a transplant experiment that exposed certain samples on trees that were lower in the community to less mist and fog. And then other samples high on the mountain, which gets lots of mist and fog. And then over a year, we monitored the number of new leaves, the depth of leaves and the depth of whole plants. And just to shorten the story for all those four species that we did the experiment with, we found that the mats that were exposed to less mist and fog had significantly higher rates of mortality, produced fewer new leads and died earlier. And so although this is an experimental setup that sort of allows us to fast forward to the future, what it tells us in a sort of horrible way that yes, climate change that drives lower amounts of mist, smaller amounts of rainfall is going to have a decidedly negative effect on these canopy dwelling plants.
Ayana Young You know, as I think about climate change, and how much it's affecting this amazing biodiversity and all of these forests, my mind goes to carbon sequestration and that's part of the 1 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. And I would love it if you could take us through how trees such as redwoods, or the temperate rainforests in general, are unparalleled at their ability to store carbon. And 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.
Nalini Nadkarni Well, I think you know, describing the carbon cycle of a forest could probably take me the next three years on your Podcast and even then we wouldn't get to the end of it. But we can also describe it very simply, I mean, that basically all of the energy or nearly all the energy of our Earth is derived from sunlight and the energy that comes from the sun. You know, there's a tiny amount that comes out of these vents in the bottoms of the ocean. But for all intents and purposes, all of our energy comes in, in the form of sunlight. But we humans, animals and any heterotrophic organisms that require sort of a digestion of that sunlight, we 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. And so over the long timespan 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. And that that carbon that's manufactured in the leaf of a redwood will endure for some period of time, maybe from three to 10 years as a single needle or leave. But at some point, it will age just like we do, it will add size, that means there'll be sort of a winding that occurs in response to sunlight and in terms of hormones, and that packet of carbon that's been stored in that leaf will fall to the forest floor, thanks to the presence of microbes that are able to decompose and move that carbon from the leaf into other forms, trees are then able to use those nutrients to create more structures, to create more leaves, to harvest more energy.
And so I think that when we think about the carbon cycle, we have to think about how long is carbon stored in these different parts of a trees structure and how long is it stored in, say, calcium carbonate deposits in a desert ecosystem, and how long has it been stored in oil reserves down far underneath the forest floor that was created during the Cretaceous? So when we think about carbon cycling, we have to think about not only how much is stored, how apparent it is, but how long will it be immobilized? How long would that carbon dioxide that's been taken out of the air thanks to photosynthesis, how long will it be stored in a tree and kept out of going back out into the atmosphere to capture more sunlight more heat and create global warming.
When you think about a fast growing tree in New England, for example, a maple tree that grows very quickly, it dies within 80 years and is recycled, that carbon is not staying immobilized very long. But when you look at a long life tree like the redwoods that you're so protective of and trying to help along, I think, that carbon is being stored for a much longer time period. So as we start thinking about strategies of storing carbon, getting it out of the atmosphere, holding on to it for as long as possible- those are the kinds of strategies that we have to think about as we design systems or modify systems and making the checks and balances of "Is it better to avoid putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere altogether," rather than thinking, "Oh, it's already in the air. And now we have to think about ways to take it out." So 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. But 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.
Ayana Young You know, one part of me really is focused on mitigating climate change. The other part is very focused on biodiversity protection and enhancement and one of your articles, details seed banks and the canopy of Monteverdi where canopies are described as "Time capsules in which seeds can be removed in both space and time," and it got me thinking about the possibility of unique genetics in hidden seeds stored in moss mats of the canopy here in the redwoods or elsewhere, perhaps holding genetic diversity that was lost when temperate rainforests were pillaged by logging and degradation, maybe even with genes advantageous to our changing climate that could bring resilient diversity to the reduced gene pools in the wake of such pervasive destruction, and I'd loved to hear your thoughts on that.
Nalini Nadkarni So the concept of seed banks in the canopy is one of the few places where tropical rainforest research is ahead of, or further developed than temperate rainforest research. You know, we've done more research in temperate regions than we have in the tropics. But in this case the study that I did was trying to understand the presence of seed banks really anywhere in the ecosystem, but in many aspects of regeneration of forest rely in the tropics, at least, rely on banks of seeds in the forest floor, that is a tree makes hundreds perhaps thousands of seeds that fall to the forest floor, some of them decompose. Some of them are eaten by you know terrestrial mammals and moved away and destroyed. But some of them just stay there on the forest floor and get buried by subsequent layers of leaves, and many of them can remain dormant in the soil for decades and sometimes centuries. When a gap opens up, that is when a tree falls over and there's sunlight that comes to the forest floor, these seeds say, "Hey, it's time to wake up!" They can germinate, they start growing into the gap. And that's one way that a forest can regenerate.
Well, 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, that 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. So there's these communities that I described before have these living epiphytic canopy dwelling plants and that soil that is present underneath them, and I thought, well, maybe that soil has seeds in them just like the terrestrial soil does. And so my students and I cut off patches of these chunks of canopy soil, we brought them into the lab, we picked out the seeds and we identified the seeds and lo and behold, there was a bank of viable seeds in these pasture trees. And so we figured that if those exist as part of a viable seed bank, if a branch falls down and that soil and those seeds ride down that branch, there's a greater probability that then a primary rainforest plant is going to grow in the shade of that isolated pasture tree. Or if the tree falls over all together, again, that is a seed bank that wasn't there before that might help or enhance the probability of the regeneration of the next generation of forests underneath these pasture trees. So we explored that we published a paper on that. It's been followed up by other people who have been doing greenhouse experiments to make sure that these trees are viable, that they can actually grow that they are protected by fences from being eaten by cows that they can actually grow and they actually call these isolated pasture trees regeneration nuclei, that is that individual tree can serve as sort of an island of safety, an island of shade. And now we know an island of a repository of canopy seeds that wouldn't otherwise be there. I think a really promising area of research in the Pacific Northwest would be to do the same kinds of studies that we've been doing in Costa Rica, but with these legacy trees that are left in clear cuts, to serve as a seed source for the next generation of trees, but to actually try to quantify that bank of seeds that are in the canopy soils that might be used as the tree branches fall or the trees as a whole fall or animals visiting the canopy of that isolated tree might take chunks of that soil or seeds themselves and disperse them to other areas. So that's another example I think of an area of forest canopy ecology that we've just barely scratched the surface and would really benefit from more scrutiny, more investigation.
Ayana Young Oh, that's incredible. I am so excited by that topic and it reminds me of fungi in these canopies as well and there are so many that are not understood. And I'm wondering, along with these seeds that are left in the canopies, what are some of the lessons from the fungi in these canopies that are also extremely biodiverse and perhaps have a similar way of helping to restore certain ecosystems and also have more research directed towards them.
Nalini Nadkarni You've hit on probably the part of canopy ecology that is the most poorly known and that is canopy fungi. And when I was putting together a textbook with a colleague of mine called forest canopies about 10 years ago, you know, we had somebody who could write a chapter about the canopy plants, the canopy birds, the canopy soils, the canopy micro organisms, canopy conservation, we couldn't find any scientist that could actually write a chapter about canopy fungi because there simply wasn't enough. There isn't enough sort of basic research that's been done to even try to integrate or synthesize what is known and what needs to be done. So all I can say is it's very rare to encounter fruiting bodies, you know, the mushrooms, you don't see those in the canopy. But we know that there are fungi there. For instance, some of the work that I've done with a graduate student of mine, Kai Rains, we looked at the roots of several of the genera of these canopy-dwelling plants, plants in the piper family, the pepper family, and also the plants in the blueberry family, the Ericaceae. And they collected roots they did the preparation to see whether or not there was a fungal component and also looked at the physical structures of the roots there, and they ascertained that those plants are indeed mycorrhizal, that they have this fungal root interaction that allows them to take greater advantage of the water and the nutrients in the soil. In this case the canopy soil, but that by whatever means the spores and propagules of the fungi that are specific to that mycorrhizal interaction are indeed up in the canopy, but who they are and what they look like and what conditions they grow in best, and how specific they are to particular species of vascular plants. Those questions are wide open.
And to me, that means that it's both super exciting and super frustrating. Super exciting, because there's lots of questions to ask and answer, but super frustrating because there still are so many missing pieces of this jigsaw puzzle of rainforests that have not been answered so that we can't even yet describe patterns, much less make predictions about what might happen in the face of global climate change or more land conversion to agricultural land because we're missing these basic pieces of biology that are so necessary to really soundly understand what's going on in an ecosystem.
Ayana Young Well, 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 and 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. And I've heard that the gathering of wild mosses for commercial uses in some temperate rainforests in the Pacific Northwest and Appalachia to be called the, "Botanical equivalent of strip mining." And in one of your publications, you reference that the US floral industry alone consumes up to 37 million dry kilograms of moss each year. 24,000 semi trucks worth of moss. So, with so much of the Earth's biological tapestry unraveling and human injustice, these are the ecological stories that just aren't being told, but moses too are sentient life forms that deserve a place in the wild web of the forest. And not only do they deserve life, but they also play a critical role in healthy dynamics of forest. So could you speak about the ecological role of epiphytes and mosses in the temperate rainforest and perhaps the cloud forests, as well, and help us understand why overharvesting is detrimental to the entire forest web?
Nalini Nadkarni Sure, well, again, this is not as well researched as I would like, but we know for sure that these mosses that grow- I'll just speak about the temperate rainforest at this point where the moss harvesting is most prevalent- that the mosses are really important from an ecosystem standpoint, as I mentioned, they're very efficient at taking up water from mist and rain and the nutrients that are contained in those droplets of rain and mist, incorporating it into their own biomass, sequestering, as well, carbon from the air that we talked about earlier with respect to climate change, but they also create habitat that is important, if not, sort of uniquely necessary for invertebrates, that canopy soil if I were to bring down a chunk of it to you on the forest floor and we looked at it under a microscope would be just crawling with all kinds of insects and with spiders, ants, beetles, earwig sow bugs, species very often that are restricted to the canopy and never seen on the forest floor. And the same is true of the microorganisms. So they're little islands of biodiversity. Again, if you if they didn't exist, if they're stripped off and they don't regenerate, then that habitat is lost for those organisms as well.
Many birds use epiphytic mosses for their nests, not only to line the nest, but also to serve as camouflage. Arboreal mammals are also known janessa, the marble murrelet itself, one of our sadly endangered and most amazing birds of the Pacific Northwest doesn't actually make a nest of moss but it sort of creates a small depression on the moss bolsters of old gross Douglas fir trees of coastal trees and coastal forests. So it's using that moss as a nest. It's very well camouflaged, which allows it to avoid predation as chicks and so these mosses as you said, are really quiet inhabitants of the temperate rainforest. They take a very long time to regenerate. I did some experiments way back in- gosh, starting in 1996, when I started stripping mosses and the canopy soils from trees, the strips were about a meter long, about three feet long. And I thought, "Oh, well, you know, everything's so lush up here, they'll just grow back, you know, they'll encroach on the side and just take over, I will probably won't even be able to tell where I stripped them off."
So I came back the next year, no mosses, next year, next year. It wasn't until 22 years later that I began seeing these mosses recolonizing. And now even 30 years later, they're really not back to their original density and the same composition. So when you strip these moses off of trees and branches, even though it looks like they're so lush, and they're so happy there, these species are fragile, and they take a very long time to regenerate. And that's one of the reasons I'd began thinking about, well, as I was thinking about and learning about the moss harvesting business and how it was spreading and how they were collecting mosses and national parks and national forests in the northwest, and based on Pat Muir's fantastic work with really documenting this, I thought that maybe one way that we could ameliorate this situation would be not to set up guards and stop people from harvesting them, but to actually learn how to grow mosses so we could farm them so that we wouldn't have to strip them out of the wild old growth forest. And I thought that maybe inmates, prisoners could help me with this process because I didn't happen to have students at that time. So I went to a local prison and I talked to the superintendent and I said, "I'd really liked to learn how to grow these mosses and could your inmates help me?" And after quite a long time of negotiations, that's what turned out they did.
We brought bags of mosses from the Olympic Peninsula. We taught them how to tell the four different species apart. They created these racks out of old recycled wood and for 18 months, they took care of those mosses and they figured out ways of helping to make them grow. And so after 18 months, I had my answer about which mosses grow fastest, what are the sort of horticultural ways that we can encourage moss growth. And they benefited from, you know, working with these living things, which they don't have an opportunity to do when they're incarcerated. And the superintendent loved it because the men started having better social interactions and being more curious about mosses and biology and science and science education. And so we've continued that project, not just moss growing but captive rearing endangered species and frogs and butterflies, starting a science lecture series in prisons, not only in Washington State, but now across the country. And so that phenomenon, that really misguided industry of collecting wild mosses has had a good part to it in that it has sort of created this opportunity instead of human interactions that has benefited those people who I think kind of need it most that is exposure to nature, exposure to education, people who are incarcerated, but also to the scientists and conservationists who have been involved with now working with the incarcerated and realizing that this is a symbiosis in a way, a set of connections, both biological and cultural and social and economic and spiritual. I think that tells us about the power of working with nature, whether it's mosses or trees, or butterflies or frogs, that all of us can benefit from.
Ayana Young Oh my goodness, there's so much to the stripping of mosses, and how long they take to regenerate is heartbreaking because mosses are just, for me one of the most spectacular parts of forests and old growth forests, but then to learn that you have been researching how to grow them on top of being able to go into these prisons where there is a lack of connection to nature and working with living beings. With these men that have been incarcerated, allowing them to be a part of this process, that's so regenerative in so many ways. And I really just want to thank you for your work that supported the mutual healing of Earth and society in a really unique way. I'm curious, you know, what kind of effect have you seen on the inmates? What kind of feedback have you heard from them?
Nalini Nadkarni Well, boy, that's a whole nother interview. But I can say in just a few words, it's transformative. It's transformative in that they, I think what has been expressed through surveys, interviews, and just sort of hanging out with them when they work in a garden, when they work with beekeeping, when they work with the frogs, when they work with the butterflies, when they see the transformation of an egg of a butterfly to a caterpillar to this beautiful thing that can fly. I think there's also a sense of identity, connecting with that with the dynamic of the possibility of change, the possibility of metamorphosis and transformation. And if you're an inmate who's been in prison for nine years, where you're separated from your wife and your kids, you know, where's the hope? Where's the hope that you can possibly find? When you think about the barriers that happen when you get out and people don't want to hire a felon or you don't have the money for renting a good place or any of that, you know, where is the hope?
And so I think what our programs have done is provide some hope, is allow the nature that they're nurturing, literally, seeing transformations, seeing that they're capable of success in nurturing, which maybe they themselves had never been nurtured before. And that's one of the reasons they're in prison, is what I see as the outcome of this. Yes, it's great to get these endangered species that we then release to the wild. But the real work, the real outcome is about that individual inmate who faces such difficulties in his or her life, moving forward, both in the prison and outside the prison. I think that contact with nature as we know, in an immediate sense creates a sense of calm, a reduction of anxiety and stress. But even more so again, that word spirituality we talked about first, that sense of connection, connection to the frog or the moss that is being cared for, but also a connection to the outside, a connection to saying, I'm doing something that's bigger than me, that's bigger than this damn prison that's bigger than my family that's as big as planet Earth because I'm helping nature regenerate itself. And to me, that's what these programs are about. And it's been a very interesting journey for me to see the connections again, the spiritual, intellectual, social connections that I started out with just looking at the biological interactions of canopy plants in their trees in the forest, writing all these scientific papers, having all these graduate students and slowly evolving, slowly changing slowly transforming myself into understanding that, "Hey, wait a minute, you can’t think about tropical rainforests these days without thinking about those farmers in the pastures who are isolating these trees, you can think about that farmer without the context of what's going on with the economy of Costa Rica, you can think about our society without thinking about prisoners who have been incarcerated for most of their adult life. They're part of our society, too." And so I feel that I've been really fortunate and being able to have witnessed and actually helped weave this tapestry of science and society in the most general of ways and the most specific of ways and that is what I try to offer to people I encounter, whether it's my graduate students, or whether it's some inmate at a prison, that in fact, there are threads that indeed do connect us to each other and to nature. And let's see how we can make those threads stronger.
Ayana Young Oh, my goodness. Nalini. I admire you so much. I mean, If we only talked about canopy species, I would have been completely mesmerized and intrigued by your knowledge but the fact that you bring in the intersectionality of so many pieces of this puzzle that we're all trying to work through right now it is just incredible who you are and how you show up in the world with your full self and your heart that is clearly so expansive from the mosses to the fungi to humans and incarcerated humans and and how that all interplays together and like you said, the farmers of Costa Rica, of course affected by the economy of Costa Rica and how this domino effect changes all of us, and either uplifts us or distracts us from the work or even keeps us from being able to be present or helpful. I mean it is a whole other interview in and of itself, but I just want to just acknowledge how deeply connected you are. And let alone your passion about so many things and building bridges beyond the scientific community. And it's wonderful because that scientific community and the knowledge tends to be inaccessible and elitist and insular to most people, and especially people who don't identify with academia or don't have the opportunity to go to college or whatever reasons. And I guess as we're coming to the end of our interview, I would just like to ask you to share with the audience, how you're endeavoring to make the teachings of the forest accessible to all and maybe just being able to round out this interview with what you're working on now. What is most important to you, and how can people support your work or, are there areas that you feel that are really important for people to get involved?
Nalini Nadkarni Oh, wow, I guess now at this stage of my life, I mean, I'm 63 years old. I've been a scientist and a professor for more than 30 years, I've lived in different parts of the country, I've done field work in different parts of the world. I feel I'm now at a stage where I'm allowed to, and I'm capable, maybe of pulling together these threads, the threads of science, threads of the arts, the threads of the humanities, the threads of human needs, especially humans who have been in bad places for my 15 years of work in prisons. And I think now I'm allowed and able to try to weave them together to think about life in its interpretation as a tapestry where each thread is pure, you know, a green thread, a red thread. I love the purity of science. I love the purity of faith-based people and how directed and singular they can be about their faith. I love the purity of the arts, of an artist who just is so great at singing opera. And then you can bring her into the canopy of a tree. And she can sing an opera about the forest canopy. And so what I'm seeing is the possibility and the need for interweaving these threads. And unfortunately, our society is often about separating threads, you know, you take your English class, your math class, your geography class, you know, your history class, and then somehow you're supposed to put those all together maybe to solve problems. And it's clear from our world right now that we need all those different threads. I mean, it's very, very rare to find a societal problem that's just one color, or could be solved by a thread of one color. So I think where I'm going now is taking what I've done before and science and continuing to do so. I'm very fortunate, and I'm leaving the day after tomorrow for three months to Costa Rica to do field work. So I'm carrying on the science thread, but I've also been able to add these other threads of the incarcerated, of the arts, of thinking about conservation in this sense of connectedness and then, you know, to create this tapestry of how science and society, how nature and humans work together. And I'm, I'm still not certain what the loom is, you know, I'm still like looking around. I've been using academia as my loom but but maybe there's some other loom that will allow me to lay the woof and the weft of these different colored threads together to more efficiently and effectively make something that's like a tapestry that's, you know, beautiful and complex and connected, and yet fragile top. I guess that's what I'm up to these days is searching for the loom that will allow me to weave these different, diverse, beautiful threads together to make something of use.
Ayana Young Well, I just want to again, thank you, for all that you have done and given back to the Earth. it's mind blowing, and it's inspiring and just gives me so much energy and honestly just, I just want to get to know you more. I'm like, "Who is this person," you are just so incredible, especially as a scientist because science holds so much power and so much influence in today's world. And many scientists are not putting all of the pieces together. I wish you could see my face right now it is smiling from ear to ear, knowing that someone like you is out there doing the work that you are doing, and influencing others along the way. So 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 masses. That is exactly what I want to do for 2018.
Nalini Nadkarni Sure, well Thanks so much.
Ayana Young Okay, thank you Nalini.
Ayana Young Thank you for listening to For The Wild podcast. I'm Ayana Young. Today we heard the sonic artistry of Emma Tricka [sic] singing "Take Me Away." Bert Jansch with "Tree Song." [sic] with "Banyan Tree Song" and Michael Ching singing "Mushroom Eye", which you can find on the Radical Mycology Mixtape, just released today on Bandcamp. Our theme music is Like A River by Kate Wolf. I'd like to thank our Producers March Young and Reach Out, our Research Director Madison Magalski, and Media Director Molly Leebove.