What the cuss is going on with these crazy stumps?! Despite being cut down, they’re still alive and growing, all thanks to the communities they live in.

See, in a healthy mature forest ecosystem all the trees, shrubs and plants are connected to one another through their roots by various mycorrhizal fungi which creates communities of different species that share resources and nutrients with one another when they’re in need. Energy in this system flows from sources of high energy to sinks of low energy so that when one tree is photosynthesizing well and producing excess sugars, those sugars will flow down to its roots to the fungi who distribute that to those in the community who may not be doing as well, so that they all can thrive.

Trees like this one that got cut down was old enough to be well connected to everything else, acting as an important hub for the fungi to transfer these nutrients. When it was felled it became an energy sink, and all these other trees here were sources, able to send it the energy it needed to continue to grow layers of cambium to seal off the wound and continue to live.

It’s an incredible example of how interconnected these forest ecosystems have evolved to be, but complexities like this are only able to exist amongst a healthy diversity of different species at different ages, like that which has been maintained here at @wildwood_ecoforest, which is a community led demonstration ecoforest on Vancouver Island where this oldgrowth forest ecosystem has been managed for almost 80 years. This project shows that it is totally possible to manage our forests for not just timber, but other values while maintaining the ecological complexity that makes them so unique - we just need to shift our perspective on these forests from resources to the intricate interconnected ecosystems that they are.

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Produced & Directed by Ross Reid

~ I'd like to acknowledge that this video was filmed on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the Coast Salish peoples–Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Stó:lō and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm Nations. ~

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