Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2022 i National Geographic Magazine - UK

SPECIAL ISSUE: SAVING FORESTS DESPITE SEEING the forest for the trees, Suzanne Simard once faced harsh criticism for her groundbreaking work. The professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia bucked the prevailing theory that a forest’s trees were isolated individuals. Her experiments showed that trees live interdependently, sharing resources via belowground networks. Simard’s essay “Lives Depend on Forests” (page 15) emphasizes how ecosystems rely on those connections, a truth that’s at the root of this special issue. Forests keep our world in balance. They’re the “lungs” of the planet, drawing in carbon dioxide and breathing out oxygen. They provide habitat for countless species. And in a warming world, they’re our best chance for survival. Yet our forests are at risk. “It’s a tough time to be a…

THE FIRST THING YOU NOTICE in this fire-scarred forest is the color. Not long ago this square of land south of Yellowstone National Park was a monochrome of ash and burned pines. But last summer, shin-high seedlings and aspen shoots painted the ground an electric green. Purple fireweed and blood-red buffalo berries sprouted around blackened logs. Yellow arnicas danced in the breeze. Five years after 2016’s Berry fire chewed through 33 square miles of Wyoming, this slice of scorched earth was responding to fire as Rocky Mountain forests have for millennia: It had entered a season of rebirth. Monica Turner was cataloging that recovery. On a sweltering July day, Turner, a professor of ecology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, shuffled along a line of tape she’d stretched 50 meters across…

DUSK WAS FALLING when we drove into the forested expanse of Lopé National Park in central Gabon, leaving the town of Lopé—the last outpost on the way to the reserve—far behind. In the distance, the hills were changing color from blue to gray. On either side of the dirt road, a mosaic of savanna and thick tropical rainforest stretched to the horizon. The landscape looked so primeval that it was possible, in the moment, to think of human civilization as an illusion. Then, just as we were about to enter a dense patch of forest, our driver, Loïc Makaga, who manages the park’s research station, slammed on the brakes. “Elephants!” he said in a low, excited voice, pointing ahead. He turned off the engine. A few hundred yards in front…

AMID ROLLING FARMS and green pasture 150 miles northwest of São Paulo, Brazil, two tropical forests bloom as one. The first consists of a single species, row after row of non-native eucalyptus, planted in perfect lines like carrots. The other is haphazard, an assortment of dozens of varieties of native saplings. There’s no denying it: This forest looks ridiculous. The gangly eucalyptuses shoot like witch fingers high above patches of stubby fig and evergreen trees. Yet these jumbled 2.5-acre stands of native trees, ringed by fast-growing exotics, are among many promising efforts to resurrect the planet’s forests. The eucalyptuses, says Pedro Brancalion, the University of São Paulo agronomist who designed this experiment, get big so quickly they can be cut after five years and sold to make paper or fence…

FROM OUR PHOTOGRAPHERS WHO An India-based molecular biologist turned nature photographer and National Geographic Explorer WHERE Nohwet, India WHAT Nikon D850 with a 24-70mm lens (and a long exposure that caused motion blur) One example of tourism’s conflicting consequences? The living root bridges in northeastern India. These arboreal wonders—often trained by locals over decades or centuries—attract visitors, who in turn fuel the economy through homestays and tours. But Yadav, while working on a National Geographic Society–funded project in 2017, saw how bridges made to support only a few people were regularly swarmed by selfie seekers. This has prompted some groups in the region to regulate access to the treasures. National Geographic is the most popular brand on Instagram, with more than 282 million followers. This page showcases images from our…

When Suzanne Simard began working in forestry after college, conventional theory held that trees were isolated loners engaged in a cutthroat Darwinian competition for water, sunlight, and food. Timber companies planted rows of the most lucrative species and eradicated most of the competition—a “plantation” approach that Simard felt ignored the messy genius of nature, with its many interwoven species. In a series of breakthrough experiments conducted while dodging grizzly bears in western Canada’s rainforests, Simard discovered that trees are connected through vast fungal root systems known as mycorrhizal networks. Via this subterranean pipeline, they share carbon, water, and nutrients. The fungi extract sugars from the tree roots that they can’t produce on their own, and in return the fungi ferry water and nutrients to the tree roots and even farther,…

IT’S FIRST LIGHT, early November, near a place called Deaf Adder Gorge on the western edge of the Warddeken Indigenous Protected Area. Northern Australia’s tropical heat pummels Arijay Nabarlambarl as he jumps out of a helicopter and strides toward a fire. Low and snaking, the flames have scorched the bone-dry wetlands, leaving singed earth and black-socked paperbark trees. The 25-year-old falls in behind two other rangers, and a symphony of leaf blowers drowns out the crackle of fire. The trio methodically walks the perimeter, blasting leaf litter from the edges back onto the fire to keep it from spreading. They’re one of three groups of Indigenous rangers in this remote pocket of Arnhem Land, about 160 miles east of Darwin, fighting a late-season wildfire, triggered by lightning, that has fingered…

BY THE TIME 77-year-old Rex Mann was old enough to work in the forests of Appalachia, they were full of the dead. “We called them gray ghosts,” the retired forester says of the American chestnut trees scattered throughout his former North Carolina home and still towering over the forest floors. They were skeletal remains of majestic trees that once grew to be as much as 100 feet tall and 10 feet wide. Over the course of the 20th century, an estimated four billion of them, one-fourth of the hardwood trees growing in Appalachia, were killed by an Asian fungus accidentally imported in the late 19th century. It’s considered one of the worst environmental disasters to strike North America—and also a preview. Emerald ash borer, sudden oak death, Dutch elm disease,…

I AM DRAWN TO THE serenity and sheer beauty of pristine nature. Being in it heightens my perceptions and narrows my focus. As I concentrate on the surroundings, an inner stillness fills me and helps me capture a sense of place. This was the case when I packed my camera equipment and ventured into some of Europe’s old-growth forests to highlight these unique environments that have remained intact for centuries, despite recurrent threats of human disturbance. The visits were often challenging because of unfavorable weather conditions and the distances I had to cover while going multiple times to the most photogenic locations. But the joy of the experience always prevailed. Hiking offtrail through the foggy laurel forests of Madeira, I was enveloped by trees that may have been up to…

SOURCES: “THE MOST EXTENSIVE DEVONIAN FOSSIL FOREST WITH SMALL LYCOPSID TREES BEARING THE EARLIEST STIGMARIAN ROOTS,” CURRENT BIOLOGY; CHRIS BERRY, CARDIFF UNIVERSITY; PATRICIA GENSEL, UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL; GAVIN FOSTER, UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON; BRIGITTE MEYER-BERTHAUD, CNRS; ERNEST M. GIFFORD AND ADRIANCE S. FOSTER, MORPHOLOGY AND EVOLUTION OF VASCULAR PLANTS; YOU-AN ZHU, CHINESE ACADEMY OF SCIENCES; NOAA…

GOLDEN NEEDLES DUST THE GROUND and collect in Greg O’Neill’s hair like bright blond highlights as he pushes his way through a grove of tall, elegant larch trees in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley. “Such a beautiful tree,” he says. “A proud species. When it finds its happy place, it goes wild.” But the “happy place” for many trees, here and elsewhere, is changing as Earth’s climate warms. These thriving larches, in fact, didn’t sprout from tree parents in this valley, or even this country. They came from 284 miles south, in Idaho, where their ancestors adapted to conditions now common here: warmer summers, slightly shorter winters, different rainfall patterns. They are part of an experiment designed to answer an increasingly urgent question: How can we help forests keep up with…

AS A CHILD IN THE 1980S, Prince Constantin zu Salm-Salm cherished walks with his grandfather through the two cathedral-like forests the family owned near an ancestral castle in central Germany. The 432-acre spreads of Norway spruce and Douglas fir, planted decades before he was born, were an investment—one the young prince hoped to inherit someday. That all changed on a February night in 1990, when a hurricane named Wiebke hit the area with winds over 120 miles an hour, battering the tree-covered hillsides around Wallhausen. After the storm finally passed, the two walked through the forests. Hundreds of towering 40-year-old spruces lay toppled. “He was in tears,” the prince recalls. “The big question my grandfather had to answer was, What do we do now?” Today Germans face a similar reckoning…