Old-growth moss mats recover almost not at all once stripped from trees

Evidence

Every scalped branch will be measured and tagged and examined for signs of re-growth. I’m looking hard for hope that these naked branches will have started to green up again. They haven’t. Maybe a trailing shoot and here and there a lone branch ventures out onto the hard dry bark. The recovery is almost nonexistent. You don’t need a sophisticated analysis to see that, but I dutifully record my data. No one knows how long it will take for them to grow back. Maybe never. Most of these mats were as old as the trees themselves, and got started when they were just saplings. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss, 607

Categorization

• SEED: Article angle: the irreplaceability of old-growth byproducts as a general argument against ‘renewable resource’ extraction from ancient systems.
• DEEPTHINKING: The pairing of ‘data recording as dutiful witness’ with the near-nonexistent recovery holds a meditation on what measurement can and cannot register about loss — a quiet paradigm case for observation-as-method in this polyad.
• XREF: connects to: Old-growth moss communities embody centuries that no technique can compress — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural…, 535; Old-growth moss mats cannot reestablish because only young twigs offer footholds — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural…, 614; Stripped moss beds regrow only centimeters per year on smooth mature bark — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural…, 613 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Low-tech tracer beads reveal that moss turf traps wind-borne seeds that bare ground loses #expands (0.75) — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss, 231