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Comment by chr1 | Hacker News Reader

Would be nice to have a version of this for semi-deserts, a tree that collects and stores large amount of water during rainy season and then secretes it in the dry season.

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Succulents and semi-succulents effectively do this. The one that sprung to mind was the Baobab tree, which stores up to 120,000 litres (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adansonia)

Trees in aggregate kind of do this already. Plant enough trees in an area and you change the local climate.

Yep. This is one of the reasons the current (and past) burning of the Amazon (and other forests) is such a problem. Forests like that create their own climatic systems, and strongly influence the weather on a local or regional level depending on their size. It's kind of like a bigger version of the effect you get when urban areas are "greened".

It’s more than just that too. Certain types of trees form forests near beaches and effectively act to pull water inland for other species of trees and plants. A lot of the things that need to be done (clean, maybe even desalinate?, water and carbon sequestration) may be done with trees.

It's easy to forget how old some genuses of trees are and that in some cases they did all of this many times before across many epochs of this planet. It is interesting to wonder what would happen if we just planted a lot more trees. Replaced some of our asphalted parking lots and flattened single crop agriculture fields back with forests.

Plants did all of these, but they did the minimal amount necessary for them to survive. We can use existing plants as a huge library to mix and match behavior to get what we need. Unfortunately "just replacing" won't produce a very good results, as in many places normal forests won't survive, and in many other places they won't produce enough food compared ti single crop fields. But with gene engineering we can change that.

Right, but the process of going from no trees to enough trees that can change climate enough to sustain themselves is very hard, and one bad year in the process can reset many year worth of progress.

The linked article made me think that perhaps it is possible to create a new species of a tree that would bootstrap this change naturally. With new gene editing methods, it should be possible to combine features of different plants to do this.

Kudzu Tree?

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