Remove boring small-talk and fillers, and keep the interesting nuggets of profound wisdom in this conversation.
compositions. Anyway, just to say I’ve started recording. So, I think the best way to use this document is for you to have a read and start commenting on and adding references or adding your opinions. I think that was the main reason we compiled it, but I think we can use this code just to go through it. And maybe… Now we could maybe focus more on the questions or on the statements. Okay, starting with her. I have here four questions, but the three of them… It is going to detail, for example, what are the mechanics, hydraulics, or animatics of gas exchange, plants. And this one is not, let’s say, strictly important for the story. It’s something that we actually have no information. And we find ourselves… The more we dig, we redefine what the story is because we start a story with certain assumptions. And then suddenly we read something new in terms of how plants work and this actually goes back and redefines the story. So we try to cast a white net and if we’re curious about something, we drop it in there. So how CO2 use by plants? Is it used only for photosynthesis and for carbon storage and sugars? Or are there more ways that CO2 is used? How does CO2 get inhaled? Like what is the mechanism of the stomata? And essentially the third bullet point sort of elaboration of the first one. But I think the most important of this four is the last one because we do… We don’t measure these pollutants with meter group sensors, but we have a very large collection from the Copernicus atmospheric data store for every manmade human-made pollutant that is measurable. And through some of our papers, some of the papers we read for the silver fair, for example, we saw that… Silver dioxide, the reductions in the area of central Europe has led to an increase of their growth rates. And we know there is a correlation between certain pollutants and the three growth, three health, and we would love to be sure about them. So we had a quick chat with DPD about what are the main pollutants. We actually gave it at least a photo pollutants week we can measure. And we asked about the main risks when it comes to plants. And we understand that some of them are direct, some of them are indirect through the effects on other organisms that plant rely on. But essentially we would like to have a very clean, very clean story, very clean narrative that… out of all the possible pollutants, maybe these three are the most critical for its area. And then we would correlate them, we would correlate all the data that we can get our hands on and see what’s the health of a tree. And in terms of the narrative, what would be interesting to see… Is there a downward trend? Are things getting better or things getting worse? Are there spikes? Are there seasonal trends? All these things we can analyze. So knowing where to focus out of these dozens of emissions that would make our lives much easier. Because the more we get into it, the more we realize that maybe everything is important, but we still need to focus on the most important things to have a story. So I think… can we scroll down? And we had some questions for the meter group. We have a question about the atmospheric pressure. And do these fluctuations that we’re already getting? Do they mean something for the trees we are looking at? Are they… are the differences too small? Is it something we can ignore or it can be part of the story? And we were also looking at the vapor pressure and the vapor pressure deficit. We understand a bit about the process… well, the mechanism that… of the upward movement of water in plants and that vapor pressure deficit… can tell us how much the plant can exhale water vapor to the atmosphere. How much potential there is for that? Correct me if I’m wrong. Sure. Do you want to jump into this right now? Yeah, let’s do it. Okay. So just a small thing. Last week there was a period where there was a very, very, very low vapor pressure deficit. And we were wondering how would the tree describe these like three days? I think if you go down… They have the question. So we have this very, very flat region. So what would the three say about this situation, about this experience? I think the position of where you take a VPD measurement is super important. So we need to… because all of… this is based on below the canopy, right? We saw where those are measured. The trees can have very different VPDs. And I don’t remember how tall these are. Are they fully up in the canopy? So the one we are measuring is about seven meters from roots to the very deep. Quite small. But the ones next to it are quite tall, 30 meters or so. The bottom line is they might have really different VPDs where the center is, then where the top of the canopy or different canopy positions are. So I think… yes, this is a piece of the puzzle. But it’s kind of just describing the water environment of the atmosphere. Dana, do you want to jump in here? Yeah, I thought maybe I’d start big picture a little bit so that you can sort of see how the… the gas flow and the water and the stomata and all of this are connected. I think that’ll be helpful. There’s a reason why we’re called carbon life forms, right? All of life is… you just carbon at its core. And carbon just has this unique property. If you think of the old tinker toys where you have a block of wood with a certain number of holes in it, right? And you can only connect based on how many holes. So carbon can connect four times, right? It’s got four holes. And so that’s why we have CO2 because oxygen has two holes, right? And so oxygen, two oxygen’s connect with the two holes and one oxygen connects with two and the other connects with two. And life uses carbon because it’s pretty stable, right? It’s both reactive and that it’s got four holes, but it’s also really stable. So all of life is interested in acquiring carbon from various sources and using that to create what we call long chain hydrocarbons, right? And a long chain hydrocarbon is a short chamber. It would be sugars and long chain could be things like cellulose. And of course, the really, really long hydrocarbons are the oil that we’re getting out of which of course is old compressed plant matter. So the process in which life does this, it gets its carbon from the atmosphere, it gets it from CO2. And it needs a process to unplug those holes to get rid of the oxygen that’s attached to it. And then it also needs the hydrogen. It needs the hydrogen from somewhere to plug in those holes with the hydrogen so that it has a stable form because you don’t want to have these open holes all the time. Life needs its whole those plugged in. So the water is coming from the soil and it’s traveling up through this island. And it is traveling through a process of capillary action. So if you remember way back in chemistry class when you saw the water sticking to the side of the glass. And when the smaller that glass is, it’s it’s so small that it uses capillary action and it’s pulled up the sides. It’s just that attraction because water has a little bit of a charge. So it’s pulled up the sides. But it can only be pulled if it’s vacating somewhere else. So in the leads you have the stomata or windows essentially on the windows either open or the windows closed. So when the windows open the vapor pressure deficit basically says if there’s less water outside than there’s water inside the water is going to keep flowing out. Okay. And when it’s really low and the windows open the water will pull the capillary action pulls out of the soil. I’ll describe a little bit more but that’s that’s that principle. So now I’ve got water which is my source of hydrogen. And I’ve got when the windows open and it’s really passive it’s a passive process when the windows open the CO2 comes in the window. So now I’ve got hydrogen which is pretty stable. You’ve got carbon dioxide which is pretty stable. I need some energy to break those bonds. I need some energy to pull the oxygen out of the holes and pull the hydrogen out of the oxygen. Well, that’s what sunlight sunlight is sunlight is that source of energy and I saw somewhere else a reference to electricity. Yeah, it’s essentially some electricity. And what a chlorophyll molecule is is a long long long molecule. When sunlight hits that molecule it excites an electron the electron bounces up the length of the molecule. And then when it falls back down because the electron doesn’t want to be excited when it falls back down life uses that energy as a power source to break some bonds. So when the bonds are broken now we can have hydrogen plugging in the holes. We can start assembling and creating sugars sugars assemble to create cellulose. And now I happen to have this extra oxygen. Well, when the windows open that oxygen is just going to flow out the window. What controls this is the really cool self regulating part of this what controls whether the window is open or not is is controlled by turgor pressure. So the stomata essentially have like two balloons around the outside you can think of the balloons used to make toys the toy balloon and stuff. Long balloon. We have a section about that. It’s quite fascinating. It’s super cool. And so when there’s enough moisture in the air, then the balloons expand. So instead of they would be flat and the balloons expand they open the window. And that’s really important when and that whether there’s enough turgor pressure is controlled by the vapor pressure deficit right that’s an indicator of the amount of moisture in the air. If you dry, then the stomata are not going to be open. So your VPD number. But it’s not in the larger forest. It’s really what’s at the surface of that stomata right and leaves have all sorts of strategies to actually reduce the vapor pressure deficit the differential. So if you’re in a state of emergency, you can see that the water can come and I can get in my CO2 and I can release my O2. That would be the ideal scenario. But yes, when it’s dry or it’s windy or whatever. So leaves use all sorts of strategies. And that’s a huge advantage when that moisture level drops or the deficit becomes so large that it’s just pumping out water faster than it can replenish from from the soil. So that’s like the high level of how all these pieces fit together. And it has bearing in a number of questions that I saw through here. So I wanted to sort of frame that process. Thank you, Dana. This makes sense. And I think it’s a very good overview. There’s something I didn’t quite the something that confused me. I thought that when the air is dry, this means that it has the capacity for more water. That’s when the stomata would open up. But you said the opposite. When the air is dry, then the differential between what’s inside the plant and what’s outside is bigger. Yeah, the BPD is a bigger number. That means there’s more demand. There’s more draw. There’s more likelihood that the water will move out, which in a place where you’ve got really moist soils, that’s no problem. Like if you go to a mangrove forest, the stomata are basically open all the time. They actually need that water to move out constantly because they’ve got to also fight the salt. But if you’re in a desert, like desert plants have special adaptations, they don’t even open their stomata in the day at all. They’re going to conserve water. Yeah, to conserve water. So carbon dioxide is not the limiting factor. Water is the limiting factor of how much a plant can grow. There’s plenty of CO2. That’s not that’s not the risk factor. But water is the limiting factor. So life has to work on this careful balancing act to make sure that it has enough water to feed the system. I think this answers lots of stuff from the next section about water. And if I understand correctly from what you Dana said and what Chris said. Essentially measuring BPD in allocation doesn’t tell you that much because ideally you would want a full matrix of measurements to understand what’s going on. And you’re going to put it on the surface of the leaf. But the key with the VPD is that the high VPD is when the plant at the highest risk. And that that keyword is risk that Dana used there. So that is going to be, you know, when the, and you know, if there’s plenty of water in the soil and not too much stress on the water column, then the plant is going to be fine. But when the plant is going to be in danger is when it’s at the highest VPD. I see, I see. So it’s not, let’s say it’s not very accurate to say that a situation with a low VPD is risk your unpleasant to the tree. It’s actually when the VPD is high that it’s more risky and stressful in a way. Definitely. Because the plant will always find a way to release. Like what I had in my mind, like I was trying to visualize it. And I was thinking what, but if this tomato clothes and then this kind of pump vertical pump action can’t be very efficient because there’s not enough pool. Maybe that’s a problem. It stops, right? So when the stomata are closed, that process of moving water up stops. But that’s okay because the stomata are closed and there’s no CO2 to work with. And so I don’t need water. Like I really only am photosynthesizing when the stomata are open, which is why say again desert plants, they grab their CO2 during the day. They grab their CO2 at night, they open the stomata at night. And then they work on processing it the next day when the sunlight’s there. Because they can’t afford to, but they, that’s why desert plants grow so slow. I mean the desert now I’m looking outside there, you know, they’re not very, very tall. So it’s, and why in the rainforest you have a huge amount of carbon that’s locked up because you’ve got no shortage of water and no shortage of sunlight. And as long as you got plenty of that and temperature, you’re not limited by, by temperature, which is another thing we can talk about, especially the fur. And I can also, when we get to that point, talk about the difference between deciduous and evergreen and how that plays all in this. I’m meeting to jump around because lots of the things you mentioned, we have them further down, but let’s, let’s make it orderly. I guess it would be nice to know if atmospheric pressure is a metric that is significant is something that we should pay attention to. Or if it’s actually not as important as the other things we’re measuring. It’s strong. Go ahead, Dana. You’re going to say probably not for the trees that we’ve got, but yeah, it’s a strong predictor of weather. So it’s on almost every weather station, but as far as tree to tree and Dana, written you correct me if I’m wrong, it doesn’t have a strong effect on trees day to day life. Okay. Unless you’re growing in the top of the Himalayas, then you might have some concerns, but that’s a bad idea. We’re good. Then we have marginal pressures, right? So it’s. Yeah. Okay. We’re definitely not installing at the top of the Himalayas in the next two weeks. Okay. Okay. Okay. One time you know that thing and I don’t want to take us off with the scientific group, but throughout the project, I’ve always been kind of looking for and then checking myself whenever I come up with these sort of. It’s slightly overly humanizing ideas about how the tree might feel or speed, or the hey. When you were talking down about the the smart opening and closing in that very sort of passive way, it immediately made me think of whether or not someone is open to what flows off from the world. There’s a very physical biological process, which the tree is not really consciously controlling it to result of its environment is maybe a sort of nice idea to him something on and say that when when the conditions aren’t such that it can be active and generating those sugars. It is physically closed off from the world. It’s existing in its own little. And then when situation changes, it becomes. The kind of thing is because tomato means in a Greek literally mouth plural. Every time we talk about it, I keep thinking of a choir choir with like lots of people singing with their mouth open. Just can’t help it. And it’s a little bit more passive, right? So it’s like it’s just you know open all day long and then closed at night. And it it’s not like there’s I mean there there is differential so the leaves that are saying really, really bright sunlight and at that surface right there the VPD is too high. And this tomato are not on the top of the leaves. Remember they’re actually on the bottom of the leaves because there’s too much risk of I mean because of course the sun dries things out so stomata are on the bottom of the leaves or often in the case of like ever greens needle clusters where there’s a cluster of needles that all fold together this tomato are then the inside. So that’s again another strategy at the very like when when back when I was studying you know you measured vapor pressure deficit as it mattered to the plant at the at the level of the stomata like you stuck a little probe in there right at the level of the stomata because that’s the number that matters to the plant. What’s happening you know a meter away is it gives you a general indication of the overall humidity in the air. But life has a lot of really cool strategies to ensure what’s happening at the level of the stomata is key. Is this quite the leaf witness moment that we’re taking could maybe play a factor. I’m not sure what you’re measuring with leaf witness. It is the duration that a leaf is wet so the leaf witness is a little different it’s going to it’s going to correlate with the PD a lot basically when you get low low low VPDs is when you’re going to start seeing condensation on your leaves and the leaf witness sensor mimic set. So it’s going to be more of a you know when your nighttime when your temperatures are lower they’ll they’ll track really pretty closely because they have the same drivers and that’s temperature and the amount of water in the air. But the main thing that’s changing from day to day is generally the temperature. So those are the two components that we’re getting that are going to that are going to drive the readings on the VPD and the leaf witness sensor it’s the amount of water in the air and the temperature. Yeah, essential the the live witness kind of correlates to this metrics right. Because it’s how much water actually condenses on the sensor and how fast or slow it. It evaporates because exactly. And so. In the chat for it was right at saying that I suppose the tree isn’t completely closed off to the world in that scenario because it’s still the still this information feeding. And through the networks below it so it’s not like it completely cuts itself off. Yeah, and it has an interest to have its tomato open as much as possible. So even if 80% are closed 20% might still be in the lower branches or in the river and it’s still in relationship with everything in the soil so that’s not on either. That’s a gradient of. So we moved to the next section to the water. Yeah, I mean this text is essentially information about the PD that. I mean this conversation actually very through but if you can also have a look here and confirm or react to it be great but let’s move to the water. So the main the main statements here. It is the act of drinking. The roots. Three can be said to be biological pumps. Can we say that SAP is the tree’s blood maybe. Can we say that Zilem is the three is the water highway. And that we we have three rows of the water here and transportation medium. From roots sometimes directly from leaves in the foliar uptake. And it’s part of through in any of the species we have that there’s foliar uptake you didn’t find any. I don’t think so. Yeah, secondly water is a reactant in photosynthesis and I can act as a stiffener or like I don’t know I don’t have any words for it but essentially it’s a part of the third group pressure mechanism that keeps. Keeps things tight anything that needs to be tied to stay tight using. Thank you. Then if we go down to the secondary statements something I actually didn’t know. Or maybe I didn’t know but I was only taught in Greek it is not in English and I never thought I never heard the word flow and. And correct to say that. Zilem is all about going from roots to leaves and flow is the other way around distributing sugars downwards is it is bidirectional. So it’s not just you know so it because you also need the sugars to meet make the leaves right so you it moves in all directions. I’d be a little worried about upward and downward. Because there’s outward and sugar sugar will go down to feed the roots and it will go up to feed the growing tip right so it’s going all derives going out to the edges of the leaves. And then I think it’s going to be a little bit of a zilem. I really don’t think of it as up and down it’s more like. It’s a it’s a path from the soil to the air. So that’s why I put quotes because it’s in my head it’s topologically up and down not physically but going from. And the notes or the start notes being the roots and the end notes being being the leaves. And yeah and another thing we were really really excited to learn. And the concept of tergar pressure. And especially when I did the math and realized that. These two megapascals. It’s actually an incredible incredible amount of pressure able to break concrete and things like that. And this is the pressure that this is from Wikipedia. I mean there is a reference to the Wikipedia haven’t verified it but it was like a crazy number to see. And that done returns I think this is an interesting thing. Think about that a plan that is considered delicate to us humans can actually exert so much pressure. Let’s say we can cut down a tree and we can destroy three in a million ways. But we don’t have the physical strength to exert that much pressure onto something as trees can exert internally through their cells. Yeah, it’s important to keep in mind that it’s living cells only so especially for trees the trunk is a lot of dead cells right and the xylem the pipes that make up the xylem are surrounded by dead cells. So or we think of as dead right like me and that’s a it’s they’re not actively engaged in the pumping of metabolic processes and growing and so on. But they’re still very much a part of the tree and that’s why of course when you cut down a trunk you have you still have rigidity and structure because the cellulose has has locked up. But if you’ve got like a young palm or you’ve got the leaves on a palm and those sorts of things but again keep in mind that it’s a mix like even a palm leaf when it comes falls off. It still has that cellulose that’s built up and created structure so it’s it’s very, very important for stomata. It’s very important for young leaves right so buds and buds opening and you know that’s part of the turgor pressure insects also use it like to unfurl their their wings. It’s part of the process of using water as pressure to open a system and hold it until the molecules backfill and give it some rigidity. So at some point cellulose takes the role of their grip pressure. Yeah and it depends on how long that those cells need to last right so in the tulip you’ve got deciduous leaves. So it’s about four or five months maybe that they need to be activated so why waste a lot of energy producing too much cellulose for those leaves because they are only needed for four to five months but the silver for and I’m not sure exactly how long they live but it’s probably four or five or six years maybe so there you need to invest in something that’s going to last five or six years. Because if you rely on turgor pressure to hold everything up and then you have a dry day or the soil is dried out then you’re in trouble because if you’re not spreading out your your leaves to the sun forget photosynthesis right so it’s it’s not a it’s helpful but not an exclusive strategy to you. I think the idea of the actual physical manifestation of a of a tree’s being being a result of how it’s adapted to I need to hand on to my leaves for this amount of time versus I can just grow them quick and delicately and then chuck them. I think that’s maybe quite an interesting contrast in in personality that we’ve got between the different species. Well and since you’re you have a question George that I can talk more about the deciduous evergreen here since you opened that up. Can we say that cellulose is expensive and water is cheap but cellulose is more permanent and water is more volatile. I wouldn’t say it’s super expensive in the sense of you know of all the molecules to assemble and build in the world there’s definitely more. The mother. Your secondary metabolites those are pretty expensive cellulose is pretty cheap because cellulose is carbon and hydrogen and there’s lots of carbon and hydrogen right and it’s things went like chlorophyll is more expensive in terms of the sense that it’s it’s got nitrogen and it’s core and therefore it’s it’s a harder molecule to find and therefore more expensive to. But also I mean this depends on the supply side so if you’ve got a high supply of water carbon gets a lot cheaper. If you if water is scarce and the strategies that all three of these plants have are very different around water. Right down to their anatomy so it’s. Yeah I think the supply of water kind of comes into this in a in a huge way. And water is a source of hydrogen and water is a transport mechanism to getting you the minerals and the other things that you need. So everything gets more expensive as water supply drops is yes yeah yeah and I don’t like the word expensive but gets more challenging challenge. We have some some questions in the similar vein of curiosity as in the first one what is sap made of. Why can’t we call it blood like inevitably feels like blood feels like one of these simplifications that people make you cut you cut a tree and it bleeds that like I find that to I find that hard to believe that that is. It has any relevance to blood in the way that we think about blood. Well I mean it is it is it is also transport mechanism I mean right the flow and it’s primarily sugars but it also has water. It also carries other building blocks so just like our blood does. Our blood the differences of course our blood transports CO2 as the metabolic waste of cells from the system. And there’s not a waste processing in trees like they it doesn’t have a filtration mechanism to remove any metabolic waste. It just gets embedded in the cellulose or in the dead cells so so that would be a fundamental difference but in terms of transporting. It means to transport nutrients and yes when when you have an insect attack. And it you there is a I mean one of the ways that insects can kill trees is they drill so many holes that it’s like yeah you’ve been cut in a gazillion places and you just leak out right and you don’t have enough pressure to hold the system together. And flow of course is on the outside of the right it’s just under the bark it’s that that living layer that’s right beneath the bark it’s not in the inside so it is the part that is most susceptible. But at the same time as you noted elsewhere that you know when will fill a wound right it will backfill and it wouldn’t be surprised if there’s also some antibiotic and antimicrobial properties in SAP. That help help heal and protect that wound because it crystallizes the sugar crystallizes you could think of it also like a blood clot that locks up so it doesn’t continue to use out in the system. Yes we have some information that we would like to look at in the chemical warfare section. The thing here the most important questions is how exactly do roots taking water and the second one is that we’ve read that three or six and chemical signals through their roots between its between individuals. And this means that they don’t only uptake chemicals but they emit and that’s this sounds fascinating and we would love to hear more about this process. And for for a meter group the main question is from a point of view of a tree and a tree’s health how shall we interpret the metric potential we discussed about last time with the soil moisture and the leaf wetness and can we can we map this values into some fuzzy categories of this is a good situation here now because of this this is a bad situation good or bad I mean they might not be the right adjectives but let’s say. Problematic or or ideal comfortable. Starting from starting with tree hydraulics yeah let’s go back to the leaf basically leaf water potential right the minus two megapascals you were talking about basically the tree doesn’t do a lot of work when it’s moving water. This continuity between the soil the plant and the atmosphere is is the driving force for the water from the trees and that’s I mean our company is based on biophysics and that’s exactly how we how we put everything together and it’s just moving water moves from a high potential to a low. Just like everything else and even when that potential is negative it’s still you’re going from a higher concentration in the soil to the air which is which is the end point for this whole thing so the air is basically pulling everything from the soil through the tree and just to use your. Just to start with the with the potentials your leaf potential is anywhere between minus one and a half to minus i’m going to get myself in trouble here let’s stay at minus two megapascals and the water or the leaf is minus two let’s say the air is minus 100. About a minus 100 megapascals let’s just make that assumption and so that’s why water is going to water vapor is going to move from the leaf into the atmosphere because that minus two megapascals is a higher potential than the minus 100 megapascals of the air and so then when you’re looking at soil potentials the soil has the highest potential if it’s totally wet it’s going to be near zero. If it’s completely saturated if it’s if it’s gets drier and these are going to be some of the things we see in the different species that we have it can get down to minus you know minus two megapascals is really common in some places and if you think about that if your soil is at minus two megapascals and your leaf is at minus two megapascals then the water isn’t going to be. So that’s the basis of how water moves through a tree is that is that progressive gradient of potentials from soil to water. And yeah this is understood and is it right to say that if we combine the metric potential on the soil with the BPD we can sort of have an image of that of that model of what’s going to happen in terms of vertical movement. In a general sense in the limits of of the sensors of course yeah exactly as Dana mentioned that when she was doing this work they measured the right at the leaf surface from where they’re measuring the model conducted so if you think about a tree canopy that has all kinds of different conditions all throughout it you can use the BPD from the sensor is kind of the general. A general from day to day plant condition but not not to the point of like calculating your vapor flux or anything like that. Well and one thing that’s I think interesting part of the story so I remember I was saying there’s these adaptive strategies that are around reducing that differential and it’s you know leaf configuration it’s leaf hairs and we call that the boundary layer so the leaf has strategies that control the boundary layer and it’s a very very thin layer in which that differential that Chris was just talking about might just be a little bit more. You know it’s a buffer between the minus two and the minus 100 and the thicker you can make that buffer the the less pressure there is to just you know pull all of this. And that’s why you see like you see waxy leaves in the desert you might see a lot of fuzzy leaves right where they’re the those long leaf hairs those are the boundary layers but boundary layers also scale so a whole forest also has a boundary layer and so when a tree is not in isolation but it’s in this community and so if you were to measure. The vapor levels underneath the canopy versus the top of the canopy versus five meters above the canopy you will also see and when you have a monoculture you don’t have a boundary layer you think of it’s like a very smooth surface at the top of and then when blows over and it just shears off that different you know the boundary layer but when you’ve got a poly culture and you’ve got all these different things you’ve got all these places you can think of them as is macro leaf. And you’ve got all these places where those moisture pockets can get get trapped. And so we look the lead also extends to the forest. What about a tree stuck out on its own like a little cheerleaf tree who seems to be by themselves is it that drastic and that even just like a small collection of trees would have this effect. Yeah, yeah. And again, it matters most where water is limited if water isn’t limited. I mean, there’s other advantages and disadvantages to being by yourself but when water is limited having a community around you’s a good thing. Yeah. Interesting. Can I have a cool signal? Yeah, so I think Brent maybe if you speak to anything you found around exidates so a number of plants produce what are called root exidates. And those are like repellents. They are compounds that leak out of the roots that are tolerable to the plant producing them but intolerable to other roots from other species. So it’s a little bit of a like don’t grow here. This is kind of my territory. I got something you know this is I’m stinky stay out of here right or whatever it might be. You have some of that the other communication channels. There’s very few circumstances that I’m aware of of like root to root. It’s root to micro rise to root. And so it’s through the micro rise connections. Some trees are very specific on which micro rise they’ll connect with. And others are more generalists and likewise for some micro rise they might only connect with a few different species and others are more generalist. So you can see the the negotiations of reciprocity happen at the contact point. So you’ve got micro rise a little network and it’s bumping up against the roots. And there’s a like okay is this going to work are we going to have an exchange here. The micro rise in addition to phosphorus is a really important one water is also important one. It increases the surface area essentially right of the tree when it’s in relationship with these micro rise. So I might be having a little relationship over here with some trees or some tree roots but another end of my micro rise network over here might be also negotiating a relationship. And an exchange for carbon because it’s really hard to get carbon when you’re buried underneath the soil. So share some of that carbon those sugars with me and I’ll give you some phosphorus I’ll have water I’ll increase your surface area. My suspicions are we don’t know what intent is here in any of this thing. But because the network in the middle my left hand is actually talking to my right hand and so any conversation my left hand is having with that tree and a you know clues can travel potentially through the roots or through the micro rise network and into the right hand and convey that information to the other adjacent tree. If you remember the other day I talked about trees are keen to sense and pick up any information they possibly can. It might be volatiles that are in the air so trees can sense the volatiles that are produced when a neighboring trees being attacked and being like, ooh, I need to bump up my defenses. Before those attackers show up here, but there also can be signals that can carry through the the micro rise networks. And Brett and your research you were saying that part of the reason that the tree has been so successful is because it is very friendly with lots of different micro riser. I mean that’s also true with what most plants right Dana like it’s it’s not like it’s just that one but yes. Yeah, and I think only. What is the only species that we’ve like bred out the relationship with micro rise but it and and summer more obvious than others, but yet, but there are I don’t know about the tulip in terms of. How what the diversity of micro rise that it connects with. I think it’s also kind of worth knowing because Dana was talking about like the whole system and the whole network a lot of times when we just like go plant one tree are we just randomly plant a couple trees are we try to uproot a tree and planted somewhere else they don’t have. Those connections are individuals and so sometimes if you’re not keeping up on the care of that tree. Then it’s going to be potentially more at risk than something that’s already in its ecosystem and it’s getting those signals and materials and water sort of back and forth so I think the point of like it’s the system. And sort of toggling back and forth from that to the individual tree is just something to think about. The tree’s help than just about its own body. Yeah, this is a. Something we’ve been oscillating with the client as well. They like the story of a three s an individual as a hero that something that. As a thing that’s in a position to be able to write to author something so the idea of the tree as a writer or analyst which suggests an individual which isn’t. Yeah, that’s the spokesperson. You know that it’s speaking of it because nobody else is really part of you or because you didn’t ask anybody else. I’ll be the one to talk on our behalf. Yeah, I mean, we love the idea of the hive mind and. Kind of spark. So this sci fi. Sci fi ideas about. Spices that can do so many things we can’t. So we’re oscillating between the three s an individual with a voice. And also the knowledge that it’s actually speaking on behalf of lots of others. I think the more we can move away from the individual as we were talking in the first session around transforming our perceptions. And just the notion that we still think of ourselves as individuals is a little obnoxious right like we completely miss that we are walking ecosystems. So you know more we can encourage that awareness that every organism is deeply interconnected with everything around it. I think is is a better way to go. Yeah. Yeah, it could be a core angle a core characteristic of that persona. Like always phrasing or always referring to the fact that. It’s not alone. It’s never alone. It’s channeling the voices of others all the time. Not in I. It’s really. We. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It could become the subtext of everything. It says. I would have connected that actually. Yes, we talked about it into class over that was great Britain, like you could almost have a simple rule that I is never used. Is that we spoke of on thinking of me on that. You know. Well, I think the thing to consider too, when you’re thinking about those networks, perhaps a certain tree needs water, or it? in some way, that might be the eye, but then it’s still connecting to the we for the help. So while you might have a sensor, you know, okay, but really it can’t survive very well without everything else. I’m going to say it can’t survive period with everyone else. Yeah. Neither can we. We can’t survive without our ecosystems. Well, in this scaling, like Dana just mentioned, we’re walking ecosystems, you know, we know that our microbiome is enormous, both on the surface of our body and inside our elbows a different ecosystem than our armpit. And then the tons, I mean, it’s not just micro-risal stuff that’s underneath the ground too. There’s all sorts of other organisms and bacteria and different things down there too. So you know, the scale isn’t just at a forest level and isn’t just micro-risal. There’s probably way more going on there that’s smaller and maybe we haven’t even found yet. So they just started documenting leaf microbiomes. Yeah, it doesn’t surprise me at all. 10, 20 years, right? Like that wasn’t even, we’re like, really they have their whole, you know, it was seen as parasites or, you know, films or molds. Yep. But now there’s like a whole part of the, part of the healthy part of the ecosystem is that. Yeah. And then that ties into the palm too and like other rainforest plants, where you’ve brimiliates and sort of other things that are on there, we used to think that it was just a problem. And if there’s enough on there, you know, it gets too heavy or whatever. But we know that there’s still like nutrient flow. There’s still some things that are happening there. There’s still some communication. You know, the sort of matted areas underneath some of those organisms can get into like these little like sort of traveling routes that a tree can have that aren’t just below the surface. Because if you think about a rainforest, you don’t have very like good soil for like deep, deep, deep, deep, deep. It’s not all that works compared to like probably where the tulip tree is where you probably have a little bit more soil. So where you think about roots and where you’re getting materials from, maybe a little bit more dispersed. So again, sort of checking ourselves to be like, is this bad? It’s always more complicated than that. And again, it’s a system at just a different scale. So like how you might consider the relationships the palm has is probably going to be a slightly different story than what this deciduous tree has because it probably has really, you know, thick, biodiverse soils that it’s pulling from. The roots are going to be different things. They’re going to go way deeper underground. For example. That was really interesting. Yeah. It was very helpful for me as well coming it from outside the data, but using the data and the way that you have described things, I was very taken with the idea of relatively shallow roots at the palm, the fact that it wouldn’t have a tap root. You know, everything that we would potentially think of the tree, you know, when you’re growing up and you have the idea of a tree as a tree, because, you know, at a very childhood level and then some of us, depending on where we go as people beyond that, don’t necessarily carry this complexity, you know, we never get beyond that. And it’s been a sort of thorough and very interesting education for me, but interestingly from the very start, we’ve started talking about this idea of the relationship of trees to tie in the relationship of trees to each other, the relationship of, you know, if they have a, if they have a consciousness, a shared consciousness and consciousness is obviously a naughty word, but it would be a high demand in that way. And the eye would be, you know, perhaps used about the specificity of one tree, but there is the actual relevance of that is communal. If that makes sense, you’ve spotted it in one individual, but it’s almost impossible, it’s incredibly unlikely that that only occurs in that one individual tree, you know, and it obviously has a relation to all the other trees around it and then further extrapolating out to, you know, to potentially all the trees in that area, you know, and tracing it down, which is what we’ve tried to do. And I think what I see my job is to kind of try and make this polyfony, but at the same time make it accessible. But ironically, I think the more interesting and weird and correct that we are, the more accessible it becomes because it awakens this childhood fascination that I think we all have for the multitudes that exist in that way and the fact that it’s not a, sort of monoculture in that way that nothing is. And when you’re talking about this, the walking ecosystem of us and the idea of the microbiome, it’s fascinating to me. So all this is incredibly helpful. So thank you, thank you everyone. Well, and some of our language is, we’re all projecting from how we see ourselves, right? So we see ourselves as individuals, so we look at a tree and we’re like, oh, that’s an individual tree. But like if you look at Aspen, you know, an Aspen is like the largest organism on the planet is an Aspen stand in Utah. That’s 80 square miles. So that’s like what, 40 square kilometers. That’s the organism because it’s genetically all identical. It’s just all these individual stems, but it is all one organism. So we just don’t even have the language because we’re limited to the language that we evolved to describe ourselves. Even how we think about death, for example, like if we have a dead tree in the forest, that’s not a waste. If you have a snag that turns a home, if you have a downed tree somewhere, that might turn into a nurse log. So even just how we perceive things like that are going to be a really different story to get to think about this. So like, you know, in the rainforest, you might talk about like the Strangler fig, which I hate that because it puts that tree in like a negative context. But you know, even if it does eventually kill the tree that it’s on, first of all, that tree was going down hill anyway. And secondly, now you have some more diversity. You’ve opened up some space and you’ve created more of that mosaic in the rainforest. So now that’s more opportunities from different species that they didn’t have it before. So I think Dana has such a strong point there because it’s not just us as an individual. It’s also how we consider intelligence, how we consider the entire life cycle of something. You know, just because you have a dead man there, and matter in the inside of your self visit tree, it’s all useful. It’s all good, all an opportunity. So like disruption, you know, if we think about a fire or a flood or a big storm, you know, how that tree might think about it versus the whole system might think about it over time is really different. It’s an opportunity. It’s not, oh my god, this is devastating. Unless we have, you know, huge fire, after huge fire, after huge fire, and that thing can’t respond with the time that it needs in between them. It’s also signing value to stuff, isn’t it? It’s also made you to go like that, so saying that’s bad. And actually, we need to look at it morelessly, but I think I was thinking earlier rather than necessarily banning the word eye, maybe it’s more useful, at least specifically within the context of the Thousand Words article or story. Maybe it’s more interesting if we’re constantly blurring the boundaries between when it says eye, when it says we, when it says them. And sometimes when we think it should say instinctively, when we think it should say eye, it instead says we all them. And actually, there’s this tree that we’re monitoring, the tree that we’ve attached to the equipment sensor to, that came into being ten years ago. But in reality, the kind of genetic memory of the we and the day has always kind of been there a lot longer. Yeah, I do just folks person. You know, like Vanessa, that feels a lot more accurate. Yeah. It is the kind of the point at which we’re measuring rather than the trees are speaking for the trees. You know, it’s not just the lore acts doing it, the trees are speaking for the trees. A breed we were lucky enough to find some great specimens that we three discanned. One was a log, I think it was a beach tree. And there were small fair trees. It was horizontal and there was a crack. And there were these little furs coming up from the bark. And we actually have a 3D model of that. That’s really crazy to have. Oh, that’s true. There were dead logs everywhere and they were full of fungi. And I don’t know, I’ve never been in a forest in this region. So it was fast, the colors were fascinating because I could see the fairs that were alive and the beach that were alive. And the ones that were dead, they were so different color, but they were still alive because you saw all the fungi on them. So it was, there wasn’t a concept of death. It was, in my eyes, it was just different colors that linked to different things going on. Well, decomposition too, right? You’re getting those nutrients back into the soil and back into the system. So it’s like feeding what’s right here, but it’s also feeding what’s down there. Yeah. And I have a sentence, I think at the bottom where I say that evergreen trees feed on the acrotic matter of their deciduous neighbors. Yeah, I will come back to that one. I’ll give to that one. Well, I just want, oh, great head Dana. I was going to say that in this sensitivity around eye and we, I would also have a radar out for any references that sound linear. And just a, you know, one way path and more and more conversation around the flow and the circularity and even if the scales, you know, you play with them at different scales will be important. Just a little thing, but I think it’s important is how we’re using the word evergreen versus deciduous. Evergreen doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a conifer, but it’s a pine. Evergreen, it’s staying green, right? When you go to the rainforest, some of those rainforests trees are dropping their leaves, they’re deciduous that like they’re dropping, they’re coming back, whatever, but some of them don’t have an evergreen tree that’s a broad leaf tree. So there’s some, some nuance there about how we use those words. Dana, go ahead. Yeah. And maybe I’ll pipe in a little bit because I think it’s important for this larger picture. Here. So there’s two strategies, right? You shed your leaves every year or you retain them for, I want to say as long as possible. No, no tree is forever green, but it’s holding its leaves in a way that we are not witnessing that common turnover. So the oldest conifers that are evergreen are the spruces and they might go like 14 years before the needles drop. So but there, if you look under a spruce, you will see some dead needles and that is the 14 year cohort. Pines tend to be a little shorter, they’re like two, three years, but we don’t see it because there’s always green on the good lot of time. And same with the tropical evergreen, the broad leaves, they’re still shedding leaves, but they last for many, many years. And the difference between this, so is water driven, right? So whether or not, and there’s two ways to approach that. So if you’re in the near the poles where you have a winter season, effectively winter to a plant, cold matters, but it’s more about access to water. So the ground freezes, when the ground freezes, there is no water move. Yeah. And I wanted to ask about this in the heat stress culture section, but yeah, yeah. Well, I’ll pipe it in here because it’s all connected. So the ground is frozen, so I need a strategy to deal with the fact that I don’t have access to that water. So I can either do the deciduous strategy when I don’t have access to water. And let me expand that. In the tropics, there are places where you have a wet and dry season. So same thing, the dry season, no rain for months at a time, the soil completely dries up. Gotta have a strategy to deal with that. So no water, I can do one of two things. I can eliminate the demand for water by eliminating the photosynthetic machinery. I just drop my leaves so that’s not there. Or I shut down my photosynthetic machinery, which is what evergreen’s do, counter for evergreen’s do. Is I just shut that down and I go into dormancy. Now with the deciduous trees, because I’m reestablishing new photosynthetic machinery every year, I’m growing new leaves, those chlorophyll, the chlorophyll, it’s like young and nimble and can grow really fast and it’s got to do its whole thing over the season, right? The spring, summer, fall, and fit it all in there. So they are very, very productive. There’s actually two types of chlorophyll, chlorophyll A, chlorophyll B. Chlorophyll A is a brighter green. When you think of like fresh leaves, they have that bright, bright green. They’re mostly chlorophyll A. Chlorophyll B is the dark green, right? The evergreen conifer color green or the evergreen broadly from the rain course, that dark, dark green. So there’s a ratio of A and B. The A is, you know, go fast, live fast, die young. It can’t last for very long. Chlorophyll B is a little bit more slow and steady because it’s got to keep producing for the spruce for 12 years. It’s got to keep delivering on that. So I drop my leaves, it’s fine. Next year I can grow new ones. And then what’s super cool, and I think this could be fun for the tulip, is the core element in chlorophyll is nitrogen, right? That’s why we use nitrogen as fertile. You’re like it. Everybody needs the nitrogen to build their chloroplasts. In a deciduous tree, it has strategies to extract that nitrogen from the leaves before it drops them because they’re so precious. Nitrogen is really hard to get. So it pulls back the green. It actually extracts the green. So that’s where you see the reds, the oranges, the yellows, the browns in the fall. Those colors have actually been there the whole time, but the green masks them. So when the green pulls back, then you’ve got, all you got left in the leaf is carbon, hydrogen. I can get some of that next year. No problem. I’ll just drop these leaves. These leaves don’t turn back into like all of the tulips leaves and the millions of carbon molecules are not now what makes the same set of leaves the next year, right? They’re in the larger ecosystem. So your comment around, yes, the evergreen is taking advantage of some of those nutrients that are dropped, but so is everybody else. Like, yeah. The carbon on the forest floor is fair game, but the carbon is not brought up through the roots. The carbon is broke down by the decomposers, the insects or whatever. They’re exhalated. It goes back to the atmosphere and then it’s available the next year as a building block from the atmosphere. So the roots never actually get the carbon from the ground? No. Only from the air. I’m bringing some of it in to give to the fungi and things that are under it. Yeah, they send carbon to the down, but they don’t bring it out. They don’t take it from the soil, which is crazy about right? Like the majority of the trees body people think it all comes from the roots. Like if you ask an average person, but no, they’re built in their bodies out of the air. Yeah. That’s amazing. It’s that soil being food thing, which is why you. I mean, you think of the carbon, the food is coming from like vitamins. Yeah. You know, you can’t survive on that alone. Well, and the way they figured out how trees grow, it was as I can’t remember the scientists, but you know, centuries ago planted a tree in a pot, little seedling, and then measured the weight of the pot and measured the weight of the soil. And then of course the tree grew and the tree got increased in mass, but the soil never lost any mass. And that’s where they figured out that it was coming from the air. Didn’t quite quite explain it at that point, but that was this expression. But nitrogen comes from the soil though. Nitrogen comes from the soil. Yes. And some plants have partners. They’ve got bacterial partners that grow nodules and all the legumes. We don’t have a legume in our group, but the legumes have nodules where the bacteria fix nitrogen. It actually comes from the air into the soil and then through the soil, right, into the plant. But the evergreen conifers, their strategy is just to shut down while the soil and it’s largely driven by temperature. You’ve got this cold and sunny and stuff on the screen. But the cool thing is, as soon as that ground defrosts, then they’re ready to go. They’ve got their machinery in place. Everybody’s ready. The needles are all there. And they can start photosynthesizing right away. And so whether or not you have deciduous broadleaf in the temperate climates or evergreen has to do with a little bit of the predictability of spring. And the more variable it is, the more likely you’re better off being an evergreen. Because if spring comes early, you’re ready. If spring comes late, you’re ready. And you’ve got that extra advantage, even if it comes at the cost that your photosynthetic rate and therefore your growth rate is slower. So that’s where our fur is kind of. That’s where your fur is. Yeah. And that’s how the fur differs from the tulip. Whereas the tulip and most of those deciduous trees are more like pretty strong in study. Now the other thing, because I’m on this route here, you’ve got the cold stress and things like that. Sometimes what’s happened, and I suspect the silver fur has this risk. And this is the big thing with climate change. And the soil is still frozen, but the air starts warming up. Then the tree can be tricked into thinking I should open my stomata. And what happens then is that pole starts. But the ground’s frozen. So there’s nothing to feed it. So then what you have is called the xylem cavitation. Because the pole is so great that it breaks the water column. And when it breaks the water column, it creates a little air bubble. Now it’s really, really cool in these evergreens because that’s a risk. It’s not like it’s an unknown risk. It happens. They have some sideway channels. The air will never dissipate. The air is always there. That channel is forever broken. But each of those pipes has some sideway connections so that there can be another path. Now if it happens too much, there’s too much cavitation, then it will kill the trees. And it’s effectively a winter kill. Sometimes you see it on the side of the mountain. It’s called a red belt where there’s an inversion. And the inversion created a warm temperature zone that lasted too long. And then the needles die and they all go red. And that makes that red belt when it’s too extreme. It’s hot. Well, that will see more of that. But then once we get over the threshold where the soil doesn’t freeze anymore, then it’s no big deal. The evergreens are like, what? We’re just going to grow year round. Thanks for the xp temperature. This is great because it connects like two or three parts of this entire document. And I think when we open the sun, I think we should also open the heat stress because the questions are related. So Dana, you say that when there’s a different temperature in the soil in the air, this can lead to zalum cavitation if the air is warmer than the soil. No, if the soil is frozen. If the soil is frozen, if the soil is below zero, essentially. Yeah. It’s frozen so that no water can be pulled into the… What we see actually now in the Czech Republic is that the air is about seven to nine degrees colder than the ground. So when we get minus nine in the air, we get like two degrees in the soil. They’re most extreme. Yeah, top there. How deep are the soil probes? Because you have to measure it at the depth of the roots. Yeah. I think I was in front of it when they installed it. The crazy remember. I mean, it wasn’t deep. It was 30, 40 centimeters. But that’s where the roots were because it was a young tree and we had a lot of rocky. It was very rocky soil. The roots weren’t able to penetrate that deep. I didn’t think it was deeper than that, yeah. 30, 40 centimeters. And again, I’ll rate it for a little bit of time, but it’s over how much time comes a problem. Yeah. And bigger trees because they have a lot more side channels or more tolerant than young seedlings are. So this was one of the factors in my dissertation that I looked at because what in my case, it was another tree that provided shade. So even though the air temperatures got warm and the ground was frozen because the seedling was in the shade of the other tree, it wasn’t subject to such a big shift in temperature and that’s what allowed it to survive. If the seed was also a fir, if the seedling was out in the open, it would have had that greater tip and they died. Like all the seedlings I planted out in the open died. I had a big question when I was looking at the climate envelopes and what people tend to measure. I didn’t see anyone measuring sunlight hours. They were using temperature as a metric. As maybe an indicator show I was thinking, what is more important? Is it temperature or sunlight? Because we measure both with our sensors. I’d love to hear Chris’s thoughts, but I will say from my perspective, sunlight is almost never limited unless you’re growing in a cave like a limiting factor or you’re in the deep, deep understory of a rainforest and you’re waiting for a light gap. There’s really not a reason to measure how much sunlight because that’s not a limiting factor and it’s highly variable with the weather. It is quite frequently measured so I’m not sure where exactly everything from a daily light integral which is the total amount of solar radiation hitting and I think I’d be a bit more information or some context on that statement. I was referring to a list of 19 bio markers that essentially can give you a good idea about the health of a forest and they only deal with temperature and precipitation. Yeah, that’s probably a lot like Dana said because light hardly ever the limiting factor unless you’re looking at the bottom of the canopy. Chris, I don’t have the table there. Sure, Chris, what are you saying? Yeah, it’s frequently not the limiting factor unless other trees are shading it. So your canopy position is huge for light. In that light measurements are made for other reasons frequently but you’re usually measuring light so that you can calculate evapotranspiration in which case the net radiation is super important or you’re trying to get a handle on productivity. But most of those, the other part of productivity is photosynthetic efficiency. Which is generally limited by water or one of these other variables. So that’s why the health light generally doesn’t hum them to health because the entire forest is usually getting the same amount of light based on your latitude or altitude or one of those other factors. So is it through that measuring radiation is more important for crops or for productive plants and less important for the types of trees we’re looking at? I think it’s 100% dependent on the questions you’re asking. There’s situations where you’re not going to really… Jeff might have a different perspective on this too. Jeff joined us a bit ago after he was able to get in. I think it’s if you’re going to do anything predictive with photosynthesis or productivity then light’s going to be hugely important and not just the light that’s striking the plant but the light that’s being absorbed by the plant. And again canopy position is going to be a really important factor in how much light the plants and a forest are getting. Jeff, what are your thoughts here? No, that’s about right. I mean, so light directly influences certain timing events, flowering those sorts of things but largely the developmental stages are driven by… You can think about as heat accumulation and so that’s why a lot of time we talk about things like growing degree days as far as how much a plant can grow because everything all enzymatic activity slows down when it gets cold. And radiation is obviously a part of that. So I guess the point is that light is very important in a lot, driving a lot of those neurological parameters, you know, vapor pressure deficit which drives ET and all that. It is directly responsible for some events but I think there’s just a lot that goes into it. They all kind of tied together as far as what the plant is looking at. But I think you’re right, George, from an agricultural perspective where what we’re trying to do is maximize productivity. You want the plants to grow as fast as possible, as much as possible. That’s going to be far more interesting than over the life of a tree where… And just what you see when you look at say the growth rings of a temperate tree, you see some ears, it grew a lot more than other ears. Some rings are super tight because they were deep in the canopy. They didn’t have much light. Other ears maybe there was a light gap and they got a lot more productivity that year. But for a tree it’s like yeah, whatever, it was a slow year, it was a fast year and there’s no value associated with that. In fact growing too fast can actually be problematic. Okay. I have a question about that in the growth section actually but in this area about heat, essentially correct me if I’m wrong, whether it’s too hot or too cold has to do with availability of water in the soil when it comes to three health, plant health. If too hot you don’t get enough water because it evaporates, if it’s too cold it can freeze and the… Is that scheme correct? I’m trying to simplify intentionally. Yeah. Definitely cold. I’m being very risky here. In this vulnerable position. Yeah, I know. I’ll buy the cold but not so much the seed. I mean plants love it pot and wet, right? That’s their favorite pot and wet and that’s where you see the greatest productivity, the greatest growth. Rainforest is like the happy place for plants. But plants that don’t get to live in that sort of optimal place have a lot of adaptive strategies. If you took a cactus and planted it in the middle of the rainforest it would not be happy because its strategies are not designed for that particular location. So yes, when it’s really, really hot but generally speaking for the basic physiology of plants as long as water is available, climate change is a good thing for plants. Yeah. Yeah. So it could be terrible for humans like the combination of really high humidity and heat but it could be quite good for trees as long as there’s no drought. Right. Exactly. It fires, etc. But the carbon piece. And I had a question. Can we have a situation where it’s so cold that the sap can become really viscous or even freeze entirely? Yeah. Totally. Okay. And that’s the problem. All the trees in Montana, my home state are frozen right now. It’s been, it’s been minus, probably minus 20 to minus 30 Celsius for the last month. They are frozen south. But the damage to the plant, it kind of depends on how ready the plant is for it, right? If it’s senescent and not actively growing then it might not necessarily be that damaged but if it has taken off and put out a bunch of new shoots and then gets a really hard freeze, that’s when it’s going to be more susceptible to serious risk or what would that risk be? I’ll use the plum in my front yard as an example. Last year we got like a minus, a minus 5 degree Fahrenheit freeze right after the early, the early trees like the forcietias and the plum, they’d taken off. They were already growing. They didn’t have concentrated sugars to have that viscosity to lower their freezing point in their, in their buds. So basically it didn’t flower at all. There wasn’t a single flower on this thing that’s usually just covered in them. It put on very little growth because all of the buds really just got, got, bros and ruptured and the tree is mostly fine except for missing a reproductive year. Yeah. Well, and some of the challenge is the decoupling, right? So the another climate change challenge is the decoupling and the timing of the events to what Christa said. If they’ve like, oh, this is spring and now we’ve got all this light because, and we’re seeing this in Montana, it’s late April, it’s May, we got a ton of light, but then oh shit, there’s a big freeze or a big snow. We’ve had trees that have just been dumped on with snow after they have leaves and they can’t handle the weight of the snow on the leaves and the branches just break off, little three breaks over. So when they’re fine, normally in the winter and the snow, so it’s when the timing of temperature and water availability and leaf production or bud production are off that it can be highly risky. There’s not, yeah, it’s not just the condition of themselves, it’s when those conditions are happening. And are they aligned with what evolutionarily, it’s been adapted to. And I question up above, I just want to add real quick because you asked about the light and we said light is not limited. You have true, how can trees thrive in very cloudy environment? There’s so much light that gets through clouds, just because we can’t see this online, it’s plenty. That being said, the reason why we had the last mass extinction when the meteor hit the planet was because the cloud, the dust cloud was so thick that and it stayed in the atmosphere over the whole planet for about three to four weeks. And that was not enough for sunlight to get through. So the plants all died, when the plants all died, the dinosaurs all died because they had nothing to eat. And only a few mammals squeaked by that happened to be the ones that fed on the rotting carcasses of the dinosaurs until the cloud dust settled and new plants grew and then the next biodiversity explosion began. So yeah, there is a limit to, if we had any clips that didn’t end forever. But on a smaller scale too, Dana was talking about the decoupling. In nature, the biodiversity we have is also based a lot on timing. So if something blooms and your pollinator isn’t there at the right time, the caterpillars eating this thing, but now the birds aren’t ready or vice versa, all those things are happening simultaneously too. So if those time pieces get knocked out of balance, then other organisms aren’t ready for the opportunities they might have normally had. So again, it’s not just the trees or the plants, it’s also insects, it’s also birds, that whole system could be disrupted. Yeah. All that’s on the edge of the extreme cold because this is also a big thing which is ice damage. Right, so not just ice damage of weight and snow, that’s why evergreens have those long bows that point down, right, that’s actually to shed the snow. But ice sheer, right? So if you’ve got evergreens and you’ve got ice crystals flying through the air, that’s going to take away your wax coat, it’s going to literally scar and scrape. And oftentimes, you’ve probably heard of crumb hults, which is a process that love this word. I don’t know if you can put it in, Dan, but are you ready for it? Big mo more foe genesis. I have it there. I think you’re around there in the temple. So yeah, it’s basically in the presence of extreme wind, which is what’s Greek for wind. Must be something related to the thing. Fig, it has to do with touching actually. And morpho, right, is shape and then growth through shape shaped by wind. So all the trees at the top of high alpine or highly exposed to wind, the ice kills off the growing edges, the buds. And so then it really only grows on the backside. So what I love about trees is that their shape tells the story of their history. And everything from house, whether the soils were sloughing or what wind exposure or what light exposure, who their neighbors might have been 50 years ago, that’s all part of the physical form that we get to see. How the question, I think we’ve answered it. Essentially, it’s important to measure both air and soil temperature. And we get bad news when the soil is frozen and the air temperature is, let’s say, at both five degrees. No, like the site where I was, we have a process called, they’re called Chinook winds. And it could be like a 60 degree difference. The wind comes down, melts all the snow, doesn’t melt the ground. And then it’s like, it feels like early summer to the tree, the upper leaves. So it’s that level of difference of like five degrees, that won’t, that won’t be enough. The endomatic reactions to react. Yeah, then we have about the four deaths. It’s, well, about the tremors, I think it’s something we don’t measure, but it’s incredible. And it’s something that’s fascinating because Chris had no idea about you, but I had no idea about this. Only in the hearsay sense of people saying, heavy metal is good for plants. Like classical. I’ve heard those stories, but I haven’t ever. I have referenced the paper from 2020 that’s a general review on the relationship of plants and sound. And all these sections in italics are from it and talk about plants and meeting different sounds due to processes happening internally in the roots and cells. And the sounds they create, they’re also the sounds they’re able to respond to. It’s kind of their range. And then I found some other research about certain species being sensitive to caterpillar chewing sounds to the point that they were playing it, playing back those sounds to it. There was no caterpillar and the tree was responding to it, but not responding to other insect sounds. Now this thing we don’t measure, we don’t have microphones on site or anything, but it would be, they could still be part of the story that could still be part of what the tree talks about. We do measure wind. So I wanted to ask me there. Can we use wind strength to infer something about the tree to? There be a micro story there, a micro narrative that relates to the wind speed or direction. And yeah, I think there’s not much to discuss about these tremors because we don’t have any data apart from wind. Yeah, I’m not sure if the wind is really going to give us much here. It’s super important if we’re going to, if we’re going to calculate like energy transfer or an energy balance of the plants and leaves or a vapour transpiration. So it’s used, it’s necessary in those kind of equations in that math beyond that. Does it? Sorry, does the Copernicus data have long term wind measurements? Yeah, yeah, it does. Does it could be interesting? I mean, at least what I’ve noticed anecdotally is that wind is just generally picked up in the places that I’ve been. And if there’s long term increases in wind, that affects the boundary layers. And then that affects the water, which affects plant growth and how much they can have their stabbata open and all of that. So if there’s that long term trend, that could be interesting in one of these sites. I don’t know what do you think, Chris. I mean, yeah, the long term trend could be really interesting. The difference between what’s happening, what’s picked up by the Copernicus and what you’re getting within the canopy could also be, could also be pretty interesting because you can get something howling up above the canopy and you’re also going to pick, I don’t know about the resolution. But you also get turbulence and things like that due to the canopy itself. And since these are further in there, it’s going to be a much more sheltered environment. Well, and didn’t we find that are all three of the species have potential for, well, they’re all wind pollinated and wind seed dispersed? Not that. That has dual. It has both large birds like your two cans and things like that are really helpful. For that. So, but yeah, they’ve got to rely on wind to a degree. We’d agree. Yeah. Even the layer is. I thought that was in second pollinated. Yeah, the two the two lips have some insect pollination to and they’re there. The super generalists. So it’s not just like. Beetle or whatever. Both of them just having multiple systems and not just one that generalist. But the seeds are wind dispersed. Yeah, the seeds are when dispersed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So sorry to jump back. Chris. The interesting correctly that with data we have from the atmosphere. We can plug them into a. Population model and actually get some some numbers out of it about the rate of operation. So, yeah, that’s the way it’s positioned. Yes, it will the way you the way it’s positioned. It will be quite different than any remote sensing. E T that you get. Because for for that model to work best, it should be positioned above the canopy. So if it’s a right down in the canopy, the solar radiation is going to be different. The wind is going to be different. What are the milder kind of valid stories that demand that we randomizing? What are the problems of the model or kind of valid, are kind of. I mean, they’re not kind of they are completely broken. But, e a In where it’s positioned, you can.. You can use it as kind of a micro climate E tea. radiation that’s incident. So it’s going to be specific to the location it’s in so you won’t be able to use it on like a bigger scale and it’s going to be very different from the UT that you remotely sent. But it can add to the story. Can you share a link? Relevant link to this? Is this something we can calculate directly from the center cloud? I can send you a link on how to get that set up so you can actually get the ET estimation as a reference. Hang on, there’s a… Let me chat about it with Jeff a little bit because I wasn’t thinking about one variable that we don’t have. But it can be kind of a kind of an index variable, let’s say instead of a quantitative instead of a quantitative estimate. Okay. We’re not publishing any of those. This is an Autistic telling. Sure. I can say the disappointment in data size. There’s always that we work with so many scientists. We’ve got to make sure we’ve got this caveat in there. Okay, let’s just want to go through everything even if we don’t go on depth. I’m super aware of time on the route. I have to jump in seven minutes. I’m not sure if when I leave it’s going to kick everyone out of the call. I hope not. But yeah, if you’re going to set it at the top of this meeting, please scroll all over this document. We will say no. We’re going to be close to the bottom so that’s good. Yeah, we’ve had identified this. This comes from a paper. It’s number two in the references. There’s these four types of deaths that we can have at Zilemm cavitation, carbon observation, biotic attacks which I guess correlate with some sort of shortage of nutrients or they’re just coincidental and fire. What do you see below are four short sentences of the LLM when we instruct it to be really dramatic, really poetic. The question is if we can identify other general ways that the trick can die and if the sensor set we have can potentially warn us about some risks and which values would we need to track. I know that the timescales we’re talking about are below tiny. I’m just wondering if we were to monitor for a longer term what would someone look at or if it’s sufficient or if someone needs more sensors. I mean if in doubt George you can just play them some the recordings of Beatles that they don’t like. They did do some sort of PTSD reaction which you talked about earlier which I found just worryingly sort of very you know anybody has ever had noisy neighbors and then you play them that they’re like oh my back. We could probably do that in real time. But yeah I mean yeah the timescales are so small and I’ve been so aware of this that this is a very good question that you’re asking. This yeah I’m just going to point out that especially the biotic attack is very much in the tree as an eye and kind of avoids the whole we of the community. I mean I think death in general so yes that doesn’t it like saying our tree guy is there for the story and it’s kind of goes against what we were talking about earlier. And also the tree being a home for a whole ecosystem in and of itself and but it’s still those ones it’s dead. It’s still those ones it’s dead. I hope an I hope an entomologist doesn’t read that. I have a banquet for the damned. It’s a little support role. I’m not going to judge I’m out of my lane. I’ll make you clear these are not suggestions but what will be going in the end article? I’m just saying death is not the end that’s the the only note I’ve made of last two minutes. So I think I think it’s interesting the fact that there are different forms of life different sorts of energy that obviously you know must continue because us you know new tonic laws and things like that but it’s very very interesting that idea of it being a host as much as it’s you know a life in its own right and an ecosystem that’s stretching you know maybe 80 square miles it’s extraordinary thoughts so I’ve been to explore that bit. And many trees that that are that that know they’re at risk and you know I use the word no in the context of how we’ve been like having this whole conversation will have a flush a massive reproductive event before you know in the last couple of years where you know they have like reproductive timing for trees isn’t it’s it’s kind of its own special thing where every like the species will synchronize and have massive years called mast years where they just throw out huge amounts of seeds and flowers and individual trees can can do this near the end of their life cycle as well so it’s the reproductive side adds different a different I don’t know I guess dimension. It’s thinking of knowing I mean that happens with the chemical signals too like if you’ve got an Acacia tree over here and it’s been nibbled on too much and it’s sending some chemicals through the air and the other trees get it they’re like oh I’m going to make myself more disgusting or the tree itself my increase or decrease what it’s making and sending it to the leaves so on a scale how they’re adapting and learning from each other like that’s happening too. But it strikes me that we have this the phrases in the language we have this idea of the final flush we have this idea of being overshadowed and this whole conversation will last a couple of hours you can see how you know they have the the genus of these phrases is probably you know our boreal agricultural in that way where we you know but the general populace just take it to mean obviously it all refers to people doesn’t it because everything lasts all the time and it’s very very interesting that this is already in the language and you know you’re just kind of like it’s a recognition of an echo rather than you know we already have it we’ve just again been disconnected from from the root of it. I’m unturned to end on that same I try and leave sign on there without breaking the call for everyone if you’ve got time please I think I need to jump on that call with you if yeah if you want to yeah it’s not going to be fun but it’s it’s really beyond amazing having all of you here contributing on this shared project we already feel wiser and from the looks of it we didn’t say to incorrect things we tried to leave we tried to let it last you for thing okay I think we’ll we’ll follow up we’ll send all of you an email with some summary of this discussion and what we would like from you to do but in a nutshell it would be great if you could go through the document and and just react to it and