When a tree dies and falls over, it is slowly broken down by fungi, insects and other decomposers, and mosses are often the first to colonize these new areas to grow on the bark. These mosses store moisture, and provide a substrate for other species to germinate on, such as hemlocks, cedars, huckleberry and ferns, which gives them an advantage by growing above the fierce competition on the forest floor where they can get better access to light. These fallen trees become nurse logs, that host the next generation of forest, and as those small trees gradually grow on top of the fallen one, their roots wrap around the tree and into the soil where they plug into a rich network of mycchorizal fungi that connect everything here to get the nutrients they need to thrive.
Eventually, the decomposers finish off the log, and what’s left is a hollow tube or flying buttress root structure of the trees that succeed, just like this cool little root tube here. This process creates incredible habitat features that bears, Martens, and all sorts of other critters will den and shelter in, and the trees that grow here will eventually die, fall over and continue this process for generations of forest, living, growing, and dying.
These complexities are a result of all the previous complexities before it, so while a tree growing here may be a thousand years old, the structural complexities they create are based on a previous tree being a thousand years old, on and on, with the structures we see today in the present being the culmination of 3, to 5, to 10 thousand years of complex ecological processes.
In other words, a forest is so much more than how old the individual trees are at any given point, and thus, they are so much more valuable and intricate than we tend to think, and so absolutely priceless.
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