Whoa there with the chainsaw, Fred

It comes as no small surprise to me that 50% of the visitors to this site are, like wasps to a ripe apple, drawn by a single (November) 2007 post: What happens when a tree is cut down? Now, I don’t suggest that they are all asking this question in the same way. The answers could vary. ‘It landed on Fred’s head’. ‘Not much, it’s still there’ But I can guess that they are more interested in carbon cycle issues, and as loggers don’t generally dig up the roots, it is the decay of these that some are interested in. Others may be interested in how the surrounding tree canopy takes over the environmental services of the missing tree.

I didn’t start the blog with these people in mind. And it tells me that I don’t get many walnut-interested readers. I shan’t be doing much in the way of enlightening these readers with more explicit information (Fred’s not expected to recover), but I will add that I estimate on our farm that about 25% of the total sequestered carbon in our trees is underground. This ignores the carbon accruing in the other vegetation, and that added to the soil annually by herbaceous plants which die back over winter.