To regrow forests the U.S. needs billions of seeds–and many more 'seed hunters' | Hacker News Reader

To regrow forests the U.S. needs billions of seeds–and many more 'seed hunters'

nationalgeographic.com

202 pointspajtai68 comments

This seems like a short term fix prone to all the problems of mono-culture. First pine-beetle infestations brining in disease put all that hard-work to naught.

There is a natural progression to growing forests, how about protecting, and just staying off large swaths of land, using fire treatment and land management techniques as we understand them and let the land restore itself? Perhaps we have to think past 5-10 year windows and start to work at plans that think a minimum of 50 years out. Old-growth forests take easily that long, at minimum, to get started "naturally".

There's also a massive undervaluing of the naturally occurring fungal network that exists between the trees. The mushrooms we see on the ground are just the reproductive organs. If you dig into the ground (and you've probably seen this many times if you've dug a hole near vegetation), there's tons of white fungal strands that connect between the tree roots. They absorb or release moisture, they transfer nutrients back and forth to the tree roots. There isn't a ton of research on it currently, but I'd bet my hat that the lack of that natural fungal network between trees just planted in rows is why planted forests rarely take hold.

Same as there's so much focus on how to capture carbon out of the air while we pump megatons in every year, it's very silly how much focus there is on replanting forests instead of just ... not cutting them down.

I agree, 1000%

Having mister bottles with spore solutions to inoculate places where the seeds are planted could be a good solution. This would also reduce deadwood, increase the growth rate of the trees, retain water, and anchor more diverse ecosystems. Mushrooms have to be part of the solution. Identifying the various types of mushroom species in local healthy forest should provide a guideline for what's sprayed with the seeds. Blended suspensions of mycelium could be the best way of inoculation, but spores would definitely be better than nothing.

Wildflowers, lichens, and other flora should also be a part, based on the local ecosystems. Monoculture or insufficient diversity could result in making things worse, whereas healthy samples represent local optima discovered by natural growth.

There’s enough research that, according to [0], British Columbia started to adjust forestry policy in the early 2000s. I enjoyed the audiobook for the interwoven story of parenting and personal growth along with the descriptions of how data was collected and shared. If you’d rather just read the research papers, see Dr. Simard’s publications [1].

[0] https://www.worldcat.org/title/finding-the-mother-tree-disco...

[1] https://forestry.ubc.ca/faculty-profile/suzanne-simard/

Funny anecdote cannabis cultivators have for a long time been using mycorrhizae. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycorrhiza

Not cutting forests down doesn’t provide sufficient opportunities for people to do things. At best you get a handful of people patrolling and maybe a small non profit with a speaker or two peacocking around.

Whereas planting carbon capture forests provides tons of opportunities for people to do things, be involved, make money, build an identity, puff themselves up.

Always look at incentives, not outcomes.

Planting trees doesn't puff you up. It breaks you down literally. Tendinitis, back pain, muscle loss. You get PTSD, you wake up years later in a cold sweat from the nightmares. And the bugs...

Is this a consequence of planting trees or of working at a breakneck pace for an abusive employer?

It's the consequence of being paid by the tree, instead of by the hour. It's the best way to do it but it does take its toll.

If the “best” way to do it is via a method which would discourage us from trying at all, we should change the definition of “best” to one that does not result in PTSD.

Well it's a go at your own pace sort of thing. Entirely self inflicted.

My son is in the boy scouts. A few years ago we met a man who had planted trees on a barren hill for his eagle project. He went back 30 years later and saw that that hill was now completely reforested. He was so inspired that he went around giving demonstrations to young scouts to try and get them interested in ecology.

Is this anecdote really to the contrary of what I said? You’ve told me all about how excited this person is about seeing the result, not anything about whether or not it was the optimal action to take 30 years ago.

It’s just human nature. There’s no way to fight it. Best to try to use it instead.

Not at all. I was just giving a concrete example from my own experience to substantiate your point.

Tbh “natural progression to growing forests” sounds to me like a mere excuse for doing nothing about the status quo. We’re already growing plants for agriculture and are currently looking to terraform Mars, and we as a species were so willing to break that “natural progression” when we started building cultures around automobiles and plastics.

Everything can be used as excuse. That's not an argument.

It is possible to cooperate with natural progression to create ecosystem that provides resources for humans. Actually humans did that for thousands of years. It has the advantages that requires much less energy input (less fertilizer, tilling) and it's more resilient to pests and climate change. It has the disadvantage that it isn't optimized for short term profit. And it isn't cool (likely to elicit "bah, weeds" response).

Tbh "mere excuse for doing nothing" sounds like a mere excuse for a lack of imaginative solutions and reluctance to take time to think things out. It doesn't follow from my statement. We can disrupt the status quo AND (in parallel) do other things. It will be incredibly difficult to take land from private shareholders and keep people "off" of it- something that will be highly disruptive. If you read 5 words further you'll see I referenced referenced land-management techniques, there is a huge wealth of science that exists, and is ongoing in this regard, applying these is the opposite of "doing nothing".

It's not fast enough. "The average forest migrates at a rate of roughly 1,640 feet each year, but to outrun climate change, it must move approximately 9,800 to 16,000 feet—up to 10 times as fast." https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2021/10/trees-forest...

[Edit 2: a more direct source for that number is https://academic.oup.com/jof/article/111/4/287/4599572 ]

Edit: also, while the article only names one species of tree, it switches to using the term "tree seed" which I think covers more diversity. At least the linked project https://www.blm.gov/programs/natural-resources/native-plant-... mentions diversity a lot, so they're not aiming for a monoculture.

I don't know if "Mother Jones" is a great source also -- "to outrun climate change,"

What does that mean exactly?

The greatest carbon sink in the world is the midwest during growing season. Would converting that into forests improve that? No.

Also, it's not clear why they only grow at the given estimated rate. I don't think it's as simple as "plant more trees".

I would interpret it as meaning: We're not going to curb our current bad habits; we're not going to stop the current trend...therefore we have come up with new / different ways to reverse (with changing modern conveniences) and eventually "outrun" the trend.

Yeah, it sounds silly to me as well.

What does that mean exactly?

It sounds like they're talking about moving climate zone boundaries.

The greatest carbon sink in the world are actually our oceans, and we’re not even close to paying attention to their health.

I think all modern takes on climate change have become very reductive. Yeah monoculturing dead forests isn’t a solution, but so is not doing anything. The ideal solution at this point frankly is to reduce human consumption and leaving large swaths of land to their own devices. Give them time to heal. (And provide some help with native flora and fauna if the land is too far gone to heal on its own).

Pollution and climate change fall squarely within Timothy Morton’s “hyperobject” definition. I accept what’s happening and I try to imagine it, and I accept that I fail to understand.

I used to like E. O. Wilson’s half-earth idea, but it’s got an eracist undertone (or overtone if you can empathize with aboriginal people displaced from homelands in the interest of national parks and the many other reasons). The US National Park System is awesome, in part for the mission statement of perpetual stewardship, and it could be so much better. Allowing traditional land-use practices could help restore and preserve landscapes. We collectively need to reduce our energy-conversion demand and agree on government regulations that help keep a balance rather than promoting or allowing for exploitation. That kind of shift will not be easy.

Feral, a book by George Monbiot, discusses rewilding in Wales. The New Wilderness, by Diane Cook, is fiction about a group of humans opting into a rewilding experiment, exchanging the amenities and stresses of the city for that of a generations-long series of camping trips.

And the best way to do this is to stop consuming animal products, as the majority of our land worldwide used for agriculture is used to support animal culture. Moving away from consuming animals free huge portions of that land, as well as helps to heal the oceans which are devastated both by the byproducts of global warming, but also directly via overfishing.

There is no version of halting global warming that does not involve reducing our reliance on eating animals and their secretions.

I’d love if the folks downvoting would care to explain how what I’m saying is neither directly relevant nor true. I’m all ears.

I will not endorse Mother Jones. However, "outrunning" is straightforward. A forest can "move" a certain amount a year — it is not motion of individual trees, but new trees and plants can grow where there were none before.

If the extents of a forest are constrained by climate, and the boundaries of its climate zone moving at a speed which is slower than the trees can move, then the collection of organisms can meaningfully persist and be said to move north. If on the other hand the climate zones are moving too quickly, then sooner or later there will no longer exist a collection of trees and related organisms that functioned as this forest once did.

Unlike ents and huorns, terrestrial trees move over generations, thus outrunning, or maybe just keeping pace with, or losing the race against, climate change.

Higher elevation tends to be colder. It’s not as simple as the plant populations moving upslope, though; some plants might have a wider tolerance range, and while evolution involves both competition and reciprocation, too much stress and/or too little time leads to extinction.

Regarding tree growth, selectively logging, reducing soil compaction, and leaving or planting birch/alder/etc along with fir/pine/etc, so long as they’re tied into the mycelial networks of our Fungal Overlords will increase total tree mass [0]. Feel free to replace “mother tree” with “parent tree”, as Doug Fir, for example, are monoecious.

[0] https://www.worldcat.org/title/finding-the-mother-tree-disco...

What happens in the Midwest that makes it a carbon sink? Growing crops that turn back into atmospheric CO2 within a couple of months would be carbon neutral at best.

"The strong atmospheric sink in the agricultural region is consistent with the difference in the spatial distribution of agricultural production and product consumption: a strong atmospheric uptake by crops during the growing season in the Midwest states, while much of the release of carbon associated with consumption of agricultural products occurs in other regions, in the United States and abroad. It must thus be pointed out that this apparent atmospheric sink in the Midwest does not imply a long-term carbon sequestration"

https://www.pnas.org/content/107/43/18348 , Discussion

Yeah, this is not growing a forest.

It's constructing a park.

Nailed it. It will need constant maintenance since weather patterns, fauna, and soil won't be self-sustaing.

If you want to see why we are in trouble look no further than this comment. Imagine thinking humans are required for nurturing all life on this planet. It's the other way around my friend. Are there situations where humans can help? Yes. Are we capabale of terra-farming. Heck no.

Terraforming or terrafarming? We already did ruinous terraforming with anthropogenic climate change.

The mainstream is stuck on nice-sounding, impractical, meaningless Bandaids rather than delving into scalable solutions that will likely require economic incentives and international coordination.

Reforestation can happen on its own if the land is left alone.

Rinderpest and the tsetse fly caused the reforestation of previously inhabited lands in sub-Saharan Africa.

http://www.faculty.umb.edu/pjt/pearce00.pdf

Anecdotal example not widely-applicable.

If the climate is changes from semi-arid Mediterranean to desert, forests will dry up, burn, and not return as they were.

This has got to be a troll, right? Basic succession ecology. Just how do you think forests came to be in the first place? You realize we have already wiped out, basically, whole species of old-growth hardwood forests here in the US (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_chestnut)? Where do you think those forest came from? Have you ever seen an empty lot for more than a couple of years? Take a look at pictures in Michigan after the exodus there.

Yes, the key to success here is restoring the soil. Once you have healthy soil, the only way to stop forests from happening is large herbivores. There are some interesting large scale efforts to attempt to restore soil across the world. It's a remarkably fast process once it gets going.

The Chinese have a few decades experience with regreening: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Green_Wall_(China)

Doing it wrong, can have some negative effects as well.

> Once you have healthy soil, the only way to stop forests from happening is large herbivores

...or primates.

As far as I understand, the natural progression to growing forest easily breaks once the forest is gone. Large swaths of land around the Mediterranean are now desert but used to be forest, until they were cut down. Erosion and other factors than stop new forests from growing. In these cases you need to kickstart the process by sending the correct starter.

Managed grazing within forested land is an option. Our forests have become too dense in many areas due to overly aggressive fire management.

https://forestry.usu.edu/news/utah-forest-facts/forest-grazi...

This is one of the fluffiest, least aligned with reality pieces I have ever read on tree propagation, and I've read a lot of silly things about tree propagation.

If I want to propagate 5,000 trees I have a few options. I can do what this article describes, and fiddle with some sort of artisan method for collecting seeds, or I can do two much more realistic things:

Plant 20,000 seeds indiscriminately, knowing full well that many wont germinate, some of the ones that germinate wont reach the true leaf stage, most of the ones that reach the true leaf stage will take a good long while to reach 1', and of those that reach 1' I should expect to lose between 1/6th and 2/3rds in the next 2 years depending on the species, growing area, etc.

Or, more likely:

Take 7,500 cuttings from various different mother plants, propagate them using highly effective methodologies tailored to the specific needs of their species based on datasets that have been honed for decades, and lose roughly 1/3rd to the luck of the draw.

Propagating from seed is something you do when you need the benefits of sexual reproduction and hybridization (look at the chestnut for an example), but if you need a lot of plants in a short period of time you propagate from cutting for many different reasons.

Does that create perfect clones ?

The tradeoff is loss of genetic variance.

If you only take one cutting per plant you’ve just moved the tree, you’re no worse off than before.

Reforestation is a red herring. Trees don't sequester much if they burn or when they die. Plus, soot from forest fires rapidly accelerates deglaciation and polar ice melting, leading to increasingly-volatile weather as the jet stream patterns destabilize from a lack of cold thermal mass at the poles. Let nature do most of the hard work and sink the results.

The most cost-effective way to solve climate change is automated "farming" of GMO oceanic biomass for CCS.

>a cache of pine cones worth $15 a bushel. These woody cones are in steep demand

A bushel, even of lightweight pine cones, is fairly large at eight gallons. For some varieties*, a bushel of pine cones delivers 1.2 pounds of pine nuts per bushel.

$15 per sounds unlike "steep demand" to me, based on my observation of prices of raw pine nuts in areas I've been where they're harvested by locals. But they provide no justification for their idea, or market context. It just leaves me suspicious.

* https://www.fs.fed.us/eng/ref/seedlings/conecoll/determine.h...

> Over the next 20 years, the U.S. aims to plant billions more trees in order to restore millions of acres of scorched forest and help offset planet-warming carbon emissions. In the West alone, some 10 million acres of recently burned land are waiting to be replanted.

This sounds like a wrong goal at first glance. One of the root causes of the crazy wildfire season we've seen (along with drought) is overpopulation of trees. Lots and lots of fuel close together. From what I've learned Western forests are _supposed_ to be thin and patchy, these forests evolved with fire in it's environment - some trees seeds do not even germinate until after a fire occurs! [0] Unless a trained forester can correct me, from my perspective the best solution is to let regrowth happen naturally for best case long term sustainability.

[0] https://www.nationalforests.org/our-forests/your-national-fo...

I used to collect seeds for the Forest Service as a kid in the 70's. Messy sticky work.

But, for those willing to really get after it, the pay wasn't bad, assuming one doesn't count the DAYS spent getting pitch off of everything, one's own self included!

I'm just thinking about all the ticks in the underbrush...

In the northwest ticks are less of a problem, but still something to watch for.

Some kinds of trees, say noble fir, it's possible to climb the tree and harvest the cones, and or shake them loose, often right into a truck bed. Fun times, 50 feet up in a tree, in the winter... :D

Can’t find the paper right now, but China has a massive effort underway to tissue culture needle trees for large areas in the West.

Single needle can basically be raised to dozens of seedlings in 3 months, and thus the only way they found to reach the scale they were looking for.

Is there sex involved, or are they clones?

Sex sex sex, that's all they think about.

(Clones if it's tissue culture)

This sounds like they are clones of the tree the needles were take from. But if the don't take a thousand needles from one tree but one needle from a thousand trees to star with, they would have a lot of generic variety. Going via needles would only mean "skipping" one generation of intermixing the genes, but the new trees would be as genetically varied as their origins.

One tree will produce millions of seeds by itself without any human help. They will form into seedlings and grow into trees also without human help.

The issue is that we don't let nature do it's thing and we want trees to be where we say. It's hubris.

Don’t we have a lot more forests in North America than 100 years ago?

I thought this was one of those counter-intuitive stats contrarians like to bring up.

It's true but mostly because in 1920 it was a historical minimum in the US. So, forests are expanding again (as in Europe and China) but apparently not very fast.

https://archive.md/OOnct

Giant forest fires enter the chat.

I survived the 2018 Camp Fire and moved to the central US where disaster risks are low.

You can't sequester anything if the trees burn or fix soil and desertification if there's no rain. This is more #TeamTrees, Great Green Wall, and Ethiopia clean-tech virtue-signaling.

Trees are supposed to burn but in patches and not en masse due to previous fires in adjoining areas. This is especially true in the area you left. The natural state of the area should be a variety of forest in different levels of maturity which helps contain the fires that do occur in the most mature and overgrown areas. The less mature forest or previous burn scars act as natural fire breaks.

I wonder if propagation from branches is possible. I know it is extremely hard but surely it could be studied and solutions found to maximize efforts? That and if these seeds are so needed then why isn’t the government paying more to encourage the industry?

> I wonder if propagation from branches is possible.

That depends on the species, but in any case trees grown via marcotting or cuttings don't have a tap root and can be susceptible to wind damage. Further, it isn't very scalable.

Maybe not scalable to industrial processes, but it scales in time. A cutting can easily create a tree of the size that a seedling would take 3-5 years grow.

How does one become a "skilled seed collector"? Are there jobs for them?

The article mentions that collectors learn by doing but there are some courses related to the profession and that there are jobs but not enough people available to do the jobs.

A helicopter cuts the top of a seed tree off and people on the ground harvest the cones. A nursery grows them into plugs that are planted a couple of years later.

That last picture doesn't look like an organically grown forest to me. More like agriculturally planted trees. I'm not convinced they are doing the right thing. Why not let nature run its course?

You don't have to steal from quirrels, they even plant the trees for free.

> the number of skilled seed collectors in the U.S. has been dwindling, though it’s not clear by how much, since the work is seasonal; it’s also gruelling [sic], for not much pay.

OK, pay people for the work then! This kind of thing always gets framed as a labor or skill shortage, but it's always a pay shortage.

These programs need money, and they need it now! The military has so much money they literally don't know what to do with it. Make them plant some damn trees! Climate security is national security.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com