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FOREST INDEPENDENT
Full Project Title
The EUropean Facility for Airborne Research (EUFAR)
Project Objectives
• Facilitate and promote transnational access to national research aircraft and instruments. • Reduce redundancy, fill the gaps, and optimise the use and development of airborne facilities to conduct research. • Improve the quality of the service by strengthening expertise through knowledge exchange, development of standards and protocols, constitution of databases, and joint instrumental research activities. • Promote the use of research facilities, especially for young scientists from countries where such facilities are lacking, by providing education and training opportunities on airborne research. • Support both market pull and technology push driven innovation in airborne research, and develop a culture of cooperation between EUFAR experts and SMEs to transfer airborne research instruments, methodologies and software into new products.
Project Funding
Following three previous contracts under FP5, FP6 and FP7, EUFAR2 will receive €6M over the 4-year span of the project (2014-2018) under EC grant agreement no. 312609.
Contact Details
Philip R.A. Brown, Cloud Physics Research Manager, EUFAR Scientific and Transnational Access Coordinator Met Office, Fitzroy Road, EXETER EX1 3PB, United Kingdom T: +44 (0)1392 886740 E: phil.brown@metoffice.gov.uk W: www.eufar.net
Phil Brown Elisabeth Gérard
Philip Brown is the Scientific and Transnational Access Coordinator of EUFAR. He has worked with airborne atmospheric measurements since joining the Met Office in 1979; his main research interests are cloud microphysical and dynamical processes. He has taken part in several UK and international field campaigns with the FAAM aircraft, studying a range of different cloud types. Elisabeth Gérard is the Project Coordinator of EUFAR, a position she has held since 2014 at Météo-France. Previously her main fields of interest were the retrieval of cloud liquid water path and total column water vapour from ground-based, airborne and satellite microwave measurements, and assimilation of satellite radiance data. Above Left: Car-based DOAS system operated in synergy with the aircraft developed by the Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy (BIRA), used during the EUFAR-funded AROMAPEX flight campaign, April 2016 (Copyright: Alexis Merlaud, Royal Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy, Belgium). Above Right: Car-based DOAS system operated in synergy with the aircraft developed by the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry (MPIC), used during the EUFAR-funded AROMAPEX flight campaign, April 2016 (Copyright: Alexis Merlaud, Royal Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy, Belgium).
Research base
A number of students from earlier summer schools have continued their studies in the field, illustrating their long-term importance, now researchers are looking to the future of the programme.
EUFAR has gained funding across three different framework programmes, but now Brown and his colleagues plan to explore the possibility of establishing it as an independent legal entity. “The hope is to maintain EUFAR, to promote networking activities amongst aircraft operators and scientific users. We hope to maintain those long-term objectives of sharing expertise on developing best practice across a whole range of activities, including developing the instruments, using them, and calibrating and processing the data,” he outlines. One of the major long-term objectives will be to provide European researchers with access to the aircraft best suited to their scientific needs. “At the moment, scientific communities in each country are geared towards using the facilities that they have access to within their own national funding structures,” says Brown.
The UK scientific community for example makes extensive use of the FAAM BAe-146 aircraft. While this aircraft has a fairly comprehensive instrument payload, it does have some limitations in terms of both the altitude it can reach and the overall range that it can achieve; Brown says other aircraft may be better suited to some research projects. “In Germany for example, researchers have had access for the last few years to the G550 HALO DLR aircraft. While it doesn’t carry quite such a comprehensive instrument payload, it can fly at higher altitudes for much longer durations. It may well be that that would be a better facility for the UK atmospheric science community,” he says. The G550 HALO DLR can be used to gather atmospheric data from the upper troposphere/lower stratosphere, yet it is not currently open to trans-national access. “Almost all the available flight time is taken by the German scientific community that supports it,” explains Brown.
A long-term objective is to establish a framework where these kinds of facilities can be shared on a wider basis, beyond that currently offered under EUFAR2. “We’ll need the member organisations to reach an agreement about how they swap flight time amongst the facilities and how they calculate their charges in order to ensure access is being shared fairly and equitably,” outlines Brown. Research in EUFAR could also hold interest outside the environmental science sphere, and Brown says researchers are keen to share findings. “We are trying to reach out across as wide a cross-section of the EUFAR community as possible to identify where groups are developing particular innovative measurement techniques, and to look for examples where those techniques or capabilities can be applied beyond the environmental science research sphere,” he continues. “There could hopefully be opportunities for small businesses across Europe to build on EUFAR research and develop marketable products.”
See the wood for the trees See the wood for the trees
It’s hard to fathom that sometimes the most familiar of things you look at everyday are not what you think they are at all. When it comes to the secret lives of trees, there could be nothing more astounding than the discoveries of recent years. Researchers from all around the world are now agreeing that forest trees are like a society and are communicating to each other about their environment through an internet-like fungus. By Richard Forsyth
When you see the domes of mushrooms sprouting in clusters on the forest floor, what you can’t see is the thin, wiry, tangled lattice of silver threads (mycelium) where the fungus spreads underground.
These sprawling fungal networks connect, infect and wrap around plant and tree roots in what’s known as a mycorrhizal network, a symbiotic bond of roots and fungus. There could be hundreds of kilometres of the threads under your very feet, with every step you take in a forest.
The fungus, which of course cannot photosynthesise, will identify, locate and collect the nutrients and water in the soil and gift it to the roots of trees in an exchange for photosynthate (sugar) from the tree. This is a ‘win-win’ woodland relationship.
As the fungus links up trees directly, even ones far away, it has facilitated another useful purpose – becoming the hardwiring for a kind of organic information superhighway, a natural living internet, passing information from tree to tree. This mycorrhizal network delivers a mixture of chemical and electrical activity to make ‘news flashes’ for trees.
The comparison to the internet is so obvious, that it’s been coined the ‘wood wide web’ by scientists involved in this research. And there are several scientists that are excited by this, in different parts of the world.
Woodland community
Suzanne Simard, of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, has become the reference point of this research when she was published in the Nature journal with her startling discoveries, back in 1997. It was one of those landmark research piece’s, that really shook up the way people perceived forests. In her own words, many thought she was ‘crazy’ for pursuing her study but she saw the research through, with truly astounding results.
Her studies showed that douglas fir and paper birch trees can transfer carbon between them via this fungal network. Carbon transfer translates to food distribution. It became apparent that the ‘wood wide net’ also has an online free delivery option attached to it.
Although this theory had been, to some extent, already demonstrated in a lab, she conducted experiments in the forest to find out more about the phenomena within the natural environment, to put a context on this method of exchange. She used two isotopes, including Carbon-13 and a radioactive isotope, Carbon-14 (radiocarbon), to trace the biological reactions in the organic material – also armed with a Geiger counter, microscopes and a toolbox of scientific equipment, borrowed from her University.
Her extensive experiments proved that trees could feed each
other – more than that – selectively feed each other, as well as work out what was going on around them in the forest. If one tree was not receiving enough nutrients, maybe because of its compromised position, then through the network, another tree spares some of its own food to pass on to the tree in need.
Specifically, she found that douglas firs would give birch trees extra carbon if they lost their leaves whilst birch trees gave douglas firs carbon when they were in the shade.
It was a complex and caring two-way flow that respected each tree’s needs when times were tough, based on a well-conceived means of highly accurate communication.
“It turns out they were conversing not only in the language of carbon but nitrogen, and phosphorous, and water, and defensive signals and chemicals and hormones – information,” stated Simard in her filmed TED lecture in 2016.
Like an internet – some of the trees acted a bit like servers – and came to be known as ‘hub trees’ or ‘mother trees’ connected to hundreds of other trees in the forest. These trees would be connected to a vast network of others, as a distribution point.
These remarkable hub trees would take responsibility for nurturing the young trees by gifting them their excess carbon – increasing their survival rates by four times. What’s more, it turned out that mother trees will even recognise and have a bias for their own seedlings – just like any good mum. The mother trees ensured their own kin had more of the mycorrhizal network to feed them, gave them more carbon and cut back their competition for roots. They also had the ability to give them insight into diseases to strengthen the next generations.
Unsurprisingly, if too many of these vital hub trees are cut down, whole tree community networks can collapse around them and put a forest into disarray.
Protecting friends and family
Trees generally, seemed to have preferences, about which other trees they helped and sometimes they would help trees of a different species.
This is supported by research by Professor Massimo Maffei at the University of Turin, who revealed that trees distinguish roots from their own species or other species and can tell which trees are direct relations of theirs.
It’s clear that there’s a system to an old woodland. A forest is not a random collection of trees that stand in isolation.
Saying this, there are caveats to who can join the tree club.
The system of this ‘social interaction’ can be quite discerning with species. For example, the western red cedar trees that also
featured in Simard’s research, appeared to be not included in the underground network, she discovered. “They were in another world”, as she put it.
There is a bias for species in these complex subterranean entanglements of fungus and root.
For those that are in the club, it’s a very active social scene. The trees are able to communicate needs and supply or deny them at will. If a tree that is favoured becomes diseased, it can be helped so it recovers, or trees close-by to each other can entwine their roots tightly together to rely on each other to the point where if one dies the other does too – perhaps an act of love?
Whilst a favourite example is for a tree to effectively say ‘I’m hungry and thirsty’, trees can also ‘shout out’ warnings of attack. If, for example, an attacking species of insect started eating a tree – stress warnings could go out to other trees, triggering defensive responses (say, becoming indigestible or releasing off-putting scents) in readiness against the attack, before it arrives.
Trees can also tell other unwelcome rooting plants or invasive species ‘where to go’ in as much as delivering toxins via the network, to their roots. Strangest of all – forests seem to be able to learn and adapt, to a degree.
The timeframe for this type of communication between trees, in comparison to the internet, is fairly slow – well – we are talking about trees, after all. The tree ‘comms system’ sends out signals at a speed of about a third of an inch per second – which can mean in some responses to situations, when there is a long distance to cover, it can take a few hours. So, we are not talking superfast broadband. This is hardly surprising when we consider plant-life lives in a different speed of time altogether, as any stop-motion film of flora will show us.
Never-the-less, this system of interconnected communication is remarkable and there is a genuine question mark over the concept of ‘intention’ of trees, that was not there previously. The debate on this question is difficult. Trees obviously don’t have brains, yet forests seem to have a brain-like quality and demonstrate what appears on the surface, as intelligent behaviour. These complex responses may well be automatically triggered, yet these findings of interaction confound our definitions, blurring our very concept of the tree. The more you look at tree society, the more you see reflections of societies like ant nests, beehives and human communities, a template of interaction we see throughout the animal kingdoms of advanced social creatures.
The volume of information that routes back and forth in this natural exchange tells us that the forests are alive with communication, and what appears like a startling level of awareness about the environment. It has even been argued that you could consider an ancient forest is more like a single organism – acting very much as an entity.
Whatever the truth of a the ‘forest society’, this understanding of forests has captured the imagination of many.
For example, if this sounds remarkably familiar to a key part of the plot of the Hollywood science fiction film, Avatar (2009), that’s not just a coincidence – but be assured, this is a case of art imitating life.
A sense of purpose
In September 2016, Peter Wohllbean published a book called The Hidden Life of Trees, exploring the notion of these forest tree communities.
Wohllbean became fascinated with the secrets of trees when he found a very old, gnarled tree stump that should have been longdead but was strangely alive. He realised that, against all odds, other nearby trees were acting as a life support and feeding it nutrients to its remaining roots.
Wohllbean pondered on that bigger question of: ‘why’ do trees need to be social beings? He concluded: ‘The reasons are the same for human communities: there are advantages to working together. A tree is not a forest. On its own, a tree cannot establish a local climate… But together, many trees create an ecosystem that moderates extremes of hot and cold, stores a great deal of
water, and generates a great deal of humidity. And in this protected environment trees can live to be very old. To get to this point, the community must remain intact no matter what. If every tree were looking out only for itself, then quite a few of them would never reach old age.’
For a long time, science focused on the competitive nature of trees: competing for light, competing for water, competing for the right spot of land. It’s a refreshing turn around that the latest research on forests shows us that in reality, forest eco-systems survive more because trees seem to work together and not apart, in order to stay alive and live well. Perhaps a lesson from nature that we would do well to try to remember.
