Back in the 1990s, University of British Columbia Forest Ecology prof, Suzanne Simard, drew colleagues’ attention to the way trees communicate with each other: Foresters were in the habit of getting rid of paper birch trees in order to promote the more valuable Douglas fir trees. But that strategy wasn’t working well. Simard and colleagues found through study and experiment that the two species of trees co-operate. According to the Arbor Day Foundation: Trees in a forest are usually thought of as fierce competitors, each struggling for control of available light and soil moisture, usually at the expense of neighboring trees. But Canadian research Suzanne W. Simard and her colleagues found that paper birch can actually aid neighboring Douglasfirs. Through carefully-controlled research, Dr. Simard has documented the transfer of carbon (sugar) from paper birch to nearby Douglasfirs. The transfer takes place through tiny underground strands of beneficial fungi called ectomycorrhizae… Dr. Simard discovered that the mycorrhizae on birch trees and Douglasfirs in her research plots interconnected. Sugars flowed between the tree roots, with a net …