Nature is out to kill everything, it is the circle of life, and that is why replanting rainforest without including some termites is counter-intuitively bad, finds a new paper.

The balance of nature doesn't exist and believing that plant diversity alone will work is in defiance of how ecosystems work. That may mean introducing termites. There is a certainly NIMBYism that will occur, just like wealthy elites who oppose nuclear energy and claim wind power is viable hire a phalanx of lawyers to block wind projects near their homes. A company or agency spending money on new trees isn't going to like giving those over to termites either. It would require convincing.

As a pilot experiment, the authors placed blocks of wood in three forested areas: an old growth forest in Australia’s Daintree Rainforest and two nearby sites replanted with rainforest trees 4 and 8 years prior to the start of the study, which had been lowland rainforest until around 1900, when they were converted into plantations to grow crops such as pineapple, banana, and oil palm and then later replanted with rainforest again.


Australia’s Daintree Rainforest, at the James Cook University Observatory. Credit: Baptiste Wijas / Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies

They checked the wooden blocks every six months to see whether they had been discovered by fungi, termites, or both, and how quickly the blocks were decomposing.  They expected termite activity to be similar in the replanted and old growth forests while fungal decay rates would be lower in the younger forests. 

It turned out to be the opposite. Fungi were resilient, functioning similarly in both the old growth and replanted forests, while termites were present at all three sites but slower to decay the wood blocks in the replanted forests than in the old growth forest, even 12 years after reforestation. The authors speculate that the slower rate of decay may be due to the size, number, diversity, or maturity of termite colonies at the recovering sites, according to the researchers. 

If so, that could mean a slower return of carbon and nutrients back to the soil. 

A regenerating forest does not yet have deadwood so they suggest transplanting deadwood logs from old growth rainforests to new ones. Those will have decomposers and that could jumpstart abundance and diversity, while also providing a food source for decomposers already there.

It's a challenging policy issue but so is buying up land and spending taxpayer money to plant trees.