Plants

Earth’s oldest, knotted and scarred pine trees are a boon for forest life. 

These old mountain pines (Pinus uncinata) offer food and shelter for lichens and insects not just because they’re old, but also because of what’s allowed them to grow so old in the first place, researchers report February 5 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The findings highlight the broader importance of big, old trees, and suggest threats to their survival from development, fire or climate change could deliver irreparable harm in certain ecosystems.

Old growth trees continue to decline around the world (SN: 6/18/18). In Europe, the remaining patches of forest with plentiful old trees constitute just 0.7 percent (or just under 3.5 million acres) of the continent’s forested area. This paper and others like it “are really good, because they show how important old growth is,” says Joseph Birch, an ecologist at Michigan State University in East Lansing who wasn’t involved with the research. This line of work serves as a reminder that we need to have a long-term perspective on old growth trees. “We need to be managing and conserving the forests that we have now, even if they’re younger, so that our descendants in a few hundred or even thousand years can have more old growth on the landscape,” Birch says.

Ancient mountain pines grow twisted and crooked over their hundreds of years of growth. Dead and decaying parts of the plant, as shown in this tree in Aigüestortes i Estany de Sant Maurici National Park in Catalonia, can serve as habitats for multiple forest species. Ot Pasques

While the pines’ old age, potentially hundreds of years old, was intriguing to plant physiologist Sergi Munné-Bosch and ecophysiologist Ot Pasques, both at the University of Barcelona, they have also been curious how aging and tree decay affect the broader forest ecosystem, with different life and decay stages providing differing habitat needs to plant, animal and lichen species.

Prior studies tended to look at how individual trees aged. So Munné-Bosch and Pasques decided up the ante. They studied young, adult and extremely old mountain pines in five different areas of the Spanish Pyrenees mountains. The duo calculated the trees’ ages based on tree trunk girth. (The two traits are correlated, eliminating the need to bore a sample out of the trunk to count tree rings). The team also weighed and measured needles, buds and shoots, analyzed the trees’ tissues for biochemicals linked to stress, decay and growth and noted age-related physical traits in the trees — such as exposed roots, fissured bark and lightning scars. Data on other species living in or on the trees were also recorded. More

Some mangrove forests off Australia have flourished in the last several decades, a new study reports. And, counterintuitively, rising sea levels may be responsible.

Off Australia’s northern coast, the skeletal remains of ancient coral reefs form the bedrock of numerous wooded islands. These low-lying tropical oases are home to diverse animals and plants, including mangrove forests that pepper their coasts and serve as vital habitat and carbon storers. A recent survey of one cluster of those islands — the first in 50 years — shows that swelling seas might have led to a massive mangrove expansion, researchers report November 1 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

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In other parts of the world, rising seas have put mangroves at risk (SN: 6/4/20). But at the Howick Islands in the Great Barrier Reef, the story is different because of its unique geologic history.

“We usually are focusing on areas of mangrove loss,” says Temilola Fatoyinbo, a forest ecologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., who was not involved with the study. “So it’s always encouraging to see areas where there’s mangrove gain.”

Mangroves — groupings of different plants that have adapted to thrive along coastlines — soak up carbon dioxide and store it as “blue carbon,” a term for carbon that is sequestered in marine environments (SN: 9/14/22; SN: 11/18/21).

“There’s a lot of interest in using mangrove blue carbon to mitigate climate change,” says Kerrylee Rogers, an environmental scientist at the University of Wollongong in Australia. “But there remains a lot of questions around their capacity to adapt to sea level rise.”

In 2021, a team led by Wollongong environmental scientist Sarah Hamylton visited the Howick Islands to see how the mangroves there are coping with sea level rise. Hamylton flew a drone over the mangroves to capture aerial imagery, while others walked through the brine to assess the plant diversity and measure individual trees. Using the measured widths and heights of several mangroves, the team extrapolated tree widths for the rest of the forest from the drone’s height data to estimate the total mangrove biomass.

The islands host nearly 54,000 metric tons of mangroves, the team estimates, which is roughly 10,000 more metric tons than was there in 1973. The forest’s reach has also expanded on many islands. While about 25 hectares of every 100 on Newton Island were covered by mangroves in 1973, for example, the forest now blankets close to 40 hectares out of 100.

Mangrove cover on Bewick Island (pictured) has grown by 50 percent since 1973. Researchers attribute this expansion to rising sea levels, which opens new habitat for the coast-loving plants.Oxana Repina

The Howick Islands are uniquely suited to supporting mangroves as the ocean rises. At the end of the Last Glacial Maximum, around 12,000 years ago, water levels rose around northern Australia, and coral reefs grew upward to fill the space that had opened for them. When sea levels fell thousands of years later, the exposed reefs eroded into sediment. With sea levels now rising again, the researchers suspect the mixture of saltwater and sediment makes a perfect home for the salt-tolerant mangroves (SN: 9/29/22).

“As sea level came back down, it wasn’t suitable mangrove habitat,” Rogers says. With those parts of the island now submerged, “it now is suitable again, and it’s largely because it was set up for those conditions [2,000] to 4,000 years ago.”

The new findings highlight the need for mangrove research on a local scale, Rogers says. “In a global model, this would get lost.” Fatoyinbo agrees. “Studies on the local scale are really useful,” she says, “to better understand big patterns.”

Rogers and Hamylton are now working on a bigger effort to study mangroves around Australia. “If we’re going to invest in mangroves … to provide us blue carbon and to protect shorelines, we need to understand how dynamic they are,” Rogers says. “And then get some more understanding of how they’re going to adapt to sea level in the future.” More

Berkley Walker didn’t plan on becoming a scientist; he wanted to be an entrepreneur. And he got started early on that goal: In high school in Portland, Ore., he started a granola bar company, which helped pay for his bachelor’s degree in microbiology.

After college, Walker went to work as a product manager at an instrumentation company in Washington state, planning to go to business school and then into biotech. But a class on environmental biophysics at nearby Washington State University in 2009 changed his trajectory.  

The course was about using mathematics to model physical systems in nature. “Working that math out to understand how energy and matter exchange within the environment,” Walker says — that was all it took. He decided to pursue a career as a plant scientist. “I wanted to have some kind of usefulness to the world,” Walker says. “Feeding people is where I settled.”

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Amazing but inefficient plants

Today, at Michigan State University, Walker wants to understand the intricate details of how photosynthesis works, with the ultimate aim of improving it.

He remains deeply fascinated by plants: “You just take this little seed, you put it in the dirt and then you get this plant,” he says. “And it spreads these leaves out. And those leaves just take the sun, and they scrub carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, and they use that to make the food that we eat, the clothes that we wear, the air that we breathe, energy that we consume. And that’s just miraculous.”

But as impressive as photosynthesis is, it is surprisingly inefficient. A leaf converts just around 1 percent of the sun’s light into usable energy, Walker says. In part that’s because of mistakes in the first step of photosynthesis. The enzyme that captures CO2 molecules and sticks them to sugar makes a lot of mistakes, often grabbing oxygen instead. Those mistakes result in a compound that actually inhibits photosynthesis. Photorespiration, a kind of recycling process, gets rid of that compound — but photorespiration requires a lot of energy.

Losses due to this recycling in the American Midwest over an average wheat and soybean growing season add up to about 148 trillion dietary calories, Walker says. “If you were to convert these calories into doughnut equivalents,” he says, “you would have a stack of doughnuts that would go to the moon and back about 11 times.”

Any efficiency gain could make a huge difference in agricultural productivity. But first scientists have to better understand how photorespiration works.

To that end, Walker came up with an innovative technique to trace carbon molecules in leaves, research reported in a 2022 paper in Nature Plants. The researchers were using flux analysis, which reveals the movements of molecules through plants’ metabolic network. But they needed a better way to freeze the metabolism of a plant. The problem was, there was no way to spray liquid nitrogen into the instrument chamber that held the leaves.

After talking to engineers at the company that makes the instrument, Walker decided to drill a hole in the chamber so his team could insert a nozzle to spray in liquid nitrogen and hit the leaf surface instantaneously. “That’s a really critical step,” says Xinyu Fu, who has been a postdoc in Walker’s lab for the past four years. A lot could change in the 10 seconds it would take to open the chamber and take the leaf out.

Xinyu Fu, a postdoc in Berkley Walker’s lab, prepares to rapidly freeze a leaf for metabolic analysis.Chelsea Mamott/Wisconsin Energy Institute

The work revealed that up to about 40 percent of the carbon-bearing amino acid serine that is produced during photorespiration gets diverted by the plant to be used for something — perhaps protein synthesis — rather than going all the way through the recycling process. That suggests optimizing photorespiration in the context of climate change could result in more nutritious, protein-rich crops. But, “as we’re trying to change it,” Walker says, “we need to understand what trade-offs there might be.”

A generosity of spirit

Colleagues who know Walker best point to his eagerness to collaborate as one of his strengths, along with his generosity of spirit.

Don Ort, a plant scientist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Walker’s postdoc adviser for nearly three years, says Walker is a committed teacher and colleague. “Being involved in the education of graduate students and postdocs is a passion for him,” Ort says. “He’s very passionate about what he does. He does it with a very high level of enthusiasm and a very high level of optimism. And it’s infectious to people around him.”

Walker sees plant science as one big community that is trying to solve two big problems: How to make crops more productive to feed a growing population, and how to do it in a changing climate, which may pose any number of challenges to agriculture. And he believes we’ll start seeing solutions in the coming decades, whether they come out of his lab or someone else’s.

“Whoever comes up with those, and if they’re shown to work and work repeatedly in a lot of crops, then that’s a really big deal,” he says. “That’s the kind of idea that we’re chasing.” More

The world’s oldest moss has seen three mass extinctions — but may not survive climate change.

The genus Takakia has the highest number of fast-evolving genes of any moss, researchers report August 9 in Cell. A decade-long study of Takakia in the Himalayas shows that the moss is well-adapted to its high-altitude home, with resistance to extreme cold and intense ultraviolet light. But no matter how fast it can tweak its genes, the scientists found, rapidly rising temperatures in the region were associated with a decrease in the moss’s range — a faster decrease than any of the mosses around it.

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Takakia consists of just two species of moss. While they can be found individually in the United States and Japan, both species occur together only on the Tibetan Plateau in the Himalayas. The two are unlike any other plant in the world. The evolutionary shoot containing Takakia branched off the other bryophytes — mosses, liverworts and hornworts — around 390 million years ago.

“The evolutionary position of Takakia in plants is like that of platypus in mammals,” says Yikun He, a plant geneticist at the Capital Normal University in Beijing. Just as the platypus has a lot of strange, not-quite-mammal traits — like egg-laying and a beak — Takakia has a bunch of features that make it not quite like other plants, such as featherlike leaves and a lack of pores for controlling the flow of oxygen and carbon dioxide.

“It looks very different from other mosses,” says Ralf Reski, a plant biotechnologist at the University of Freiburg in Germany. “For a long time, it was unclear if it was a moss.”

The tiny, lobed leaves on this Takakia moss haven’t changed their looks since the Jurassic Period, which ended about 145 million years ago.Xuedong Li

To learn more about mysterious Takakia, Reski, He and their colleagues set up a long-term study in the Tibetan Plateau, more than 4,000 meters above sea level.

Over 11 years, the researchers collected samples, analyzed genomes, collected data on the surrounding ecosystem and compared modern specimens with fossils from 165 million years ago. The team also had to evacuate several students due to altitude sickness. The field sites were accessible only in August and September, and even then, “the climate is unpredictable, and one day may experience spring, summer, autumn and winter,” He says.

Humans might have had a tough time, but the moss was comfortable in its high-altitude home. That’s due in part to its genes. While Takakia sports a genome whose length is average for a bryophyte — just over 27,400 genes — it has the largest known number of fast-evolving genes of any moss, liverwort or hornwort, the researchers found.

Takakia needed that speed when the Himalayas began to rise 65 million years ago. As the mountains stretched toward the sky, the mosses on them were exposed to lower temperatures and higher amounts of ultraviolet light. They had to adapt. And adapt Takakia did.

The new study showed the moss’s ability to withstand solar radiation. When the researchers exposed Takakia to a high amount of UV light, it was unharmed, while comparison mosses began to die within 72 hours. The hardy moss produces “high amounts of metabolites like flavonoids and polyunsaturated fatty acids to protect against radiation,” Reski says. It also sports genes to enable more efficient DNA repair — essential protection against harmful rays.

Takakia also adapted to the extreme cold. It can go dormant for eight months of the year while under snow, and gets all of its growth and reproduction done, He says, “in the precious three-to-four-month light window period.”

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All of these features evolved from about 50 million years ago to the present, the study showed, without ever changing the moss’s physical appearance compared with fossils of Takakia from about 165 million years ago.

But this relatively speedy evolution doesn’t seem to be fast enough to help the moss adapt to climate change (SN: 3/10/22).

During the 11 years of the study, Reski, He and their colleagues documented an average increase in temperature of about four-tenths of a degree Celsius in the region. Meanwhile, the coverage of Takakia in their sample population decreased by about 1.6 percent per year — faster than four other local mosses.

The researchers predict that by the end of the 21st century, suitable conditions for Takakia will be limited to only 1,000 to 1,500 square kilometers around the world. By that time, the researchers suspect, the world’s oldest moss could be extinct.

Others are more optimistic about the fate of this tough little moss. There are populations in other places, says evolutionary biologist S. Blair Hedges. So while the Tibetan Plateau may eventually be Takakia-free, he hopes the moss can make it elsewhere.

What’s more, “it’s fantastic to see all these different things known about a single [genus], from the fossil record all the way up to the complete genome,” says Hedges, of Temple University in Philadelphia.

In the meantime, He, Reski and their colleagues are cultivating Takakia populations and transplanting them to other regions in Tibet in the hopes of giving old moss a new lease on life. “Takakia saw the dinosaurs come and go. It saw us humans coming,” Reski says. “Now we can learn something about resilience and extinction from this tiny moss.” More

Microbial stress can be a boon for young trees.

Saplings grown in soil microbes that have experienced drought, cold or heat are more likely to survive when faced with those same conditions, researchers report in the May 26 Science. And follow-up tests suggest that the microbes’ protective relationship with trees may linger beyond initial planting.   

The team’s findings could aid massive tree planting efforts by giving new saplings the best chance of survival over the long run, says Ian Sanders, a plant and fungal ecologist at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. “If you can control which microbes are put onto tree saplings in a nursery, you can probably help to determine whether they’re going to survive or not when they’re transplanted to the field.”

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As climate change pushes global temperatures ever higher, many species must either adapt to new conditions or follow their ideal climate to new places (SN: 1/25/23). While forests’ ranges have changed as Earth’s climate has warmed and cooled over hundreds of millions of years, the pace of current climate change is too fast for trees to keep up (SN: 4/1/20).

Trees live a long time, and they don’t move or evolve very quickly, says Richard Lankau, a forest ecologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. They do have close relationships with fast-adapting soil microbes, including fungi, which can help plants survive stressful conditions.

But it was unclear whether microbes that had previously survived various climates and stresses might give inexperienced baby trees encountering a changing climate a leg up. With friends in the soil, “trees might have more tools in their toolkit than we give them credit for” to survive tough conditions, Lankau says.

For the study, Lankau and fellow ecologists Cassandra Allsup and Isabelle George — both also at UW–Madison — collected soil from 12 spots in Wisconsin and Illinois that varied in temperature and amount of rain. The team then used the soils to plant an abundance of 12 native tree species, including white oak (Quercus alba) and silver maple (Acer saccharinum). Overall, “we had thousands of plants we were monitoring,” Allsup says.

Those saplings grew in the soils in a greenhouse for two months before being transplanted in one of two field sites — one warm and one cold. To simulate drought, some trees in each spot were placed under transparent plastic sheets that blocked direct rainfall.

One site in northern Wisconsin was at the northern edge of the trees’ range and represented how trees might take root in a new area that’s getting warm enough for them to grow. There, trees planted in soil containing cold-adapted microbes better survived Wisconsin’s frigid winter temperatures. Plants that faced drought in addition to the cold, on the other hand, didn’t have the same benefit.

The other location, set up in central Illinois, was designed to represent a region where the climate is getting too hot or dry for the tree species to tolerate. Saplings grown in soil with microbes from arid spots were more likely to survive a lack of rain. But those grown in soils with heat-tolerant microbes were only slightly more likely to survive when they received normal rainfall. 

Some fungi, including this jack-o’-lantern mushroom (Omphalotus illudens), have a close relationship with trees. That connection could help saplings expand their range amid changing climate.Cassandra Allsup

Resident species already living in the area didn’t outcompete all of the transplanted microbes. Newly introduced fungi persisted in the soil for three years, a sign that any protective effects might last at least that long, the team found. 

It’s still unclear which microbes best aid the trees. Analyses of microbes living in the soil hinted that fungi that live inside plant roots may better help trees survive drought. Cold-adapted soils seem to have fewer fungal species. But soils also contain bacteria, archaea and protists, Sanders says. “We don’t know what it is yet that seems to affect the plant survival in these changing climates.”

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Determining which microbes are the important ones and whether there are specific conditions that best suit the soil is next up on the list, Allsup says. For example, can dry-adapted soil from Iowa help when planting trees in Illinois? “We need to think more about soils and combinations and [transplant] success… to actually save the forest.”

One caution, Sanders says, is that transporting microbes from one place to another en masse could bring the bad along with the good. Some microbes might be pathogens in the new place where they’re transplanted. “That’s also a big danger.”  More

The tissues of living trees may hold the secrets of why some can recover after drought and others die. But those tissues are challenging to assess in mature forests. After all, 90-year-old trees can’t travel to the lab to get an imaging scan. So most studies of the impacts of drought on plants are done in the lab and on younger trees — or by gouging cores out of mature trees.

Barbara Beikircher, an ecophysiologist at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, and colleagues came up with a different approach: They brought the lab to the trees.

In the Kranzberg Forest outside Munich, the team outfitted stands of mature spruce and beech trees with rugged, waterproof ultrasound sensors. Some of the stands had been covered by roofs to block the summer rain, creating artificial drought conditions.

Researchers outfitted stands of mature spruce and beech trees with ultrasound sensors and electrical probes to figure how the species cope with long dry spells.University of Innsbruck

Five years of monitoring revealed that beeches (Fagus sylvatica) are more drought-resilient than spruces (Picea abies), the team reported in the December Plant Biology. Delving into the underlying mechanisms explained this difference.

Drought-stressed trees produced more ultrasound signals than trees exposed to summer rains. Those faint acoustic waves were bouncing off air bubbles called embolisms deep within the trees’ vasculature. Surface tension keeps water moving through a tree’s thousands of tiny vessels — evaporation from pores in leaves drives water up the trunk (SN: 9/6/22). But if there’s insufficient water in the soil, this upward pull can generate embolisms that clog vessels. In the experiments, spruces pinged much more than beeches, suggesting they had far more embolisms.

That’s despite the fact that beeches appear to be less conservative with their water management, at least aboveground. Trees can prevent embolisms by closing the pores on their leaves, but there’s a trade-off. Doing so cuts off the supply of the carbon dioxide that drives photosynthesis, which makes the carbohydrates and sugars that trees need to live and grow. In dry conditions, trees face an impossible choice “between starving and dying of thirst,” Beikircher says.

Beeches suffered fewer embolisms than the spruce, even though they kept their pores open longer than the conifers did. Perhaps that’s because beeches have roots that extend into deeper, wetter soil as well as more robust water reserves, Beikircher says. Another set of experiments after the researchers relieved the drought suggests that’s the case.

At the end of the experiment, the team drenched the soil. All the trees recovered well by most measures: Rates of photosynthesis in the previously parched trees caught up to the rates of trees in the control groups and embolisms filled with water.

But when Beikircher measured the trees’ resistance to an electrical current, an indication of moisture levels deep within trunks, the spruces’ water reserves were still depleted. One season of rain was not enough to help these trees fully recover. It’s unclear whether spruces can replenish their reserves after prolonged drought or how long that might take.

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Species that can withstand drought conditions and recover more quickly may become more populous in future forests as climate change causes droughts to become more frequent and intense (SN: 3/10/22). That means the compositions of the trees that make up the world’s temperate forests could change as the climate warms, with uncertain consequences for the other plants and animals in these ecosystems.

Beikircher plans to test whether a more diverse forest could help drought-sensitive species like the spruce survive. Deep-rooted beeches interspersed with spruces might help increase moisture in the soil’s upper levels by wicking water up to where spruce roots are, she says. More