Making Eden
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New Phytologist, 186, 514–25. See also the accompanying commentary: Bonfante, P. & Selosse, M.A. (2010) A glimpse into the past of land plants and of their mycorrhizal affairs: from fossils to evo-devo. New Phytologist, 186, 267–70.
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61. Delaux, P.-M. et al. (2015) Algal ancestor of land plants was preadapted for symbiosis.
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62. Stokstad, E. (2016) The nitrogen fix. Science, 353, 1225–7.
63. Kloppholz, S., Kuhn, H. & Requena, N. (2011) A secreted fungal effector of Glomus intra-radices promotes symbiotic biotrophy. Current Biology, 21, 1204–9. See also the accompanying explanatory commentary by Sanders, I.R. (2011) Mycorrhizal symbioses: how to be
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64. Terrer, C. et al. (2016) Mycorrhizal associations as a primary control of the CO 2
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65. Salisbury, E.J. (1961) William Henry Lang. 1874–1960. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, 7, 146–60.
7. Sculpting climate
1. A readable account of the story of fossil finds at Gilboa is given in VanAller Hernick, L.
(2003) The Gilboa Fossils. New York State Museum, Albany, NY.
2. Goldring, W. (1927) The oldest known petrified forest. Science Monthly, 24, 514–29.
3. Stein, W.E. et al. (1997) Giant cladoxylopsid trees resolve the enigma of the Earth’s earliest forest stumps at Gilboa. Nature, 446, 904–7. See also the accompanying commentary: Meyer-Berthaud, B. & Decombeix, A-L. (2007) Palaeobotany. A tree without leaves. Nature, 446, 861–2.
4. Stein, W.E. et al. (2012) Surprisingly complex community discovered in the mid-Devonian fossil forest of Gilboa. Nature,483, 78–81. See also the accompanying commentary: Meyer-Berthaud, B. & Decombeix, A-L. (2012) Palaeobotany. In the shade of the earliest forest. Nature, 483, 41–2.
5. Berner, R.A. (2013) From black mud to Earth system science: a scientific autobiography.
American Journal of Science, 313, 1–60.
6. Berner’s thinking along these lines was set out in a couple of key papers. Berner, R.A. (1992) Weathering, plants, and the long-term carbon cycle. Geochimica, Cosmochimica Acta, 56, 3225–31. Berner, R.A. (1997) The rise of plants and their effect on weathering and atmospheric CO . Science, 276 , 544–6.
2
7. Papers presented at the meeting were published in: Beerling, D.J., Chaloner, W.G. & Woodward, F.I. (eds) (1998) Vegetation–climate–atmosphere interactions: past, present and future. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, B353 , 1–171.
8. Basalt holds a special place in the slow dance of the geochemical carbon cycle. Despite the fact that it makes up less than 10% of the Earth’s continental surface, it succumbs to chemical destruction by weathering relatively quickly. Iceland is ideal for these sorts of investigations because it is almost entirely composed of basalt, being located above the massive 65 000-km Mid-Atlantic Ridge that wraps around the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. Volcanic eruptions at this boundary create new ocean floor, inexorably forcing the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates apart at rates of 1 cm to 20 cm per year, a process known as sea-floor spreading. As oceanic plates move apart, molten rock wells up from tens of kilometres down, producing enormous volcanic eruptions of basalt.
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9. Moulton, K.L. & Berner, R.A. (1998) Quantification of the effects of plants on weathering: studies in Iceland. Geology, 26, 895–8. A detailed treatment is given in: Moulton, K.L., West, J. & Berner, R.A. (2000) Solute flux and mineral mass balance approaches to the quantification of plant effects on silicate weathering. American Journal of Science, 300, 539–70.
10. See Moulton & Berner (1998) and Moulton et al. (2000).
11. These other studies were summarized by Berner et al. (2003) Phanerozoic atmospheric oxygen. Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences, 31, 105–34, and by Taylor, L.L. et al.
(2009) Biological weathering and the long-term carbon cycle: integrating mycorrhizal evolution and function into the current paradigm. Geobiology, 7, 171–91.
12. Berner, R.A. (2004) The Phanerozoic Carbon Cycle: CO and O . Oxford University Press, 2
2
New York.
13. Mitchell, R.L. et al. (2016) Mineral weathering and soil development in the earliest land plant ecosystems. Geology, 44, 1007–10.
14. Field evidence from boreal forests in north-western Ontario suggests lichens and mosses cause intense (but very shallow) chemical weathering leading to the production of secondary minerals, clays, and thin soils; these effects being absent from adjacent bare areas of the same granitic outcrop. See Jackson, T.A. (2015) Weathering, secondary mineral genesis, and soil formation caused by lichens and mosses growing on granitic gneiss in a boreal forest environment. Geoderma, 251–252, 78–91.
15. Quirk, J. et al. (2015) Constraining the role of early land plants in Palaeozoic weathering and global cooling. Proceedings of the Royal Society, B282, 20151115, doi.org/10.1098/
rspb.2015.1115.
16. Lenton, T.M. et al. (2012) First plants cooled the Ordovician. Nature Geoscience, 5, 86–9.
17. Edwards, D., Cherns, L. & Raven, J.A. (2015) Could land-based early photosynthesizing ecosystems have bioengineered the planet in mid-Devonian times? Palaeontology, 58, 803–37. See also experimental evidence with liverworts that when scaled up gives
weathering fluxes 2–5% of contemporary trees: Quirk, J. et al. (2015) Constraining the role of early land plants in Palaeozoic weathering and global cooling. Proceedings of the Royal Society, B282, http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2015.1115.
18. Chen, J., Blume, H.-P. & Beyer, L. (2000) Weathering of rocks induced by lichen colonization—a review. Catena, 39, 121–46.
19. Mora, C.I., Driese, S.G. & Colarusso, L.A. (1996) Middle to late Paleozoic atmospheric CO levels from soil carbonate and organic matter. Science, 271, 1105–7.
2
20. The movement of Earth’s tectonic plates, on which the continents sit, through the Devonian probably also played a role by slowly bringing landmasses into warmer, more humid low-latitude climate zones. Acting in concert with the spread of forests, this could have further hastened the weathering of silicate rocks and carbon dioxide sequestration into ocean sediments: see Hir, G.L. et al. (2011) The climate change caused by the land plant invasion in the Devonian. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 310, 203–12.
21. See, for example, Retallack, G.J. (1997) Early forest soils and their role in Devonian global change. Science, 276 , 583–5; Elick, J.M., Driese, S.G. & Mora, C.I. (1998) Very large plant and root traces from the Early to Middle Devonian: implications for early terrestrial ecosystems and atmospheric p(CO ). Geology, 26, 143–6. An attempt at drawing 2
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quantitative inferences from diverse literature reports regarding the evolutionary advance of trees and their effects on the global environment is reported here: Retallack, G.J. & Huang, C.M. (2011) Ecology and evolution of Devonian trees in New York, USA.
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22. Morris, J.L. et al. (2015) Investigating Devonian trees as geo-engineers of past climates: linking palaeosols to palaeobotany and experimental geobiology. Palaeontology, 58, 787–801.
23. See Morris et al. (2015).
24. Morris, J. et al. (in prep) Early forest soils of the Middle Devonian, New York State, USA. Palaios; Stein, W.E. et al. (in prep) Mid Devonian root systems signal revolutionary change in earliest fossil forests. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA.
25. See Goldring (1927).
26. Mahaffy, P.R. et al. (2015) The imprint of atmospheric evolution in the D/H of Hesperian clay minerals on Mars. Science, 347, 412–4.
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28. Hillier, S. (2006) Formation and alteration of clay materials. Geological Society of London, Engineering Geology Special Publication, 21, 29–71.
29. See Kennedy et al. (2006).
30. Taylor, L.L. et al. (2009) Biological weathering and the long-term carbon cycle: integrating mycorrhizal evolution and function into the current paradigm. Geobiology, 7, 171–91.
31. Berner, R.A. & Cochran, M.F. (1998) Plant-induced weathering of Hawaiian basalts.
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32. Jongmans, A.G. et al. (1997) Rock-eating fungi. Nature, 389, 682–3; Hoffland, E. et al. (2003) Feldspar tunnelling by fungi along natural productivity gradients. Ecosystems, 6, 739–46.
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34. It gained the status of National Arboretum in 2001, the same year as Bedgebury Pinetum, Kent, was declared the country’s National Pinetum. Bedgebury Pinetum is, as the name suggests, a complementary collection of conifers set in 350 acres of rolling Wealden countryside. It began life in the 1840s when established by the Beresford Hope family and suffered when the 1987 storm destroyed up to a third of the trees; it has since been extensively replanted.
35. Quirk, J. et al. (2012) Evolution of trees and mycorrhizal fungi intensifies silicate mineral weathering. Biology Letters, 8, 1006–11.
36. Support for this view also turned up at the other end of the planet in the forests of South Island, New Zealand. Rock grains in soils beneath forests of southern beech ( Nothofagus menziesii) and forests of Podocarpaceae trees are pockmarked with numerous small trenches, tunnels, and pits. These forests form partnerships
exclusively with the recently evolved ectomycorrhizal fungi or the ancestral arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, respectively, but the role of these fungi in making the
tunnels in this study is unproven. In other words, field observations implicate
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both groups of fungi in weathering processes. See: Koele, N. et al. (2014) Ecological significance of mineral weathering in ectomycorrhizal and arbuscular mycorrhizal ecosystems from a field-based comparison. Soil Biology and Biogeochemistry, 69, 63–70.
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43. Quirk et al. (2014a).
44. See Leake & Read (2017).
45. Ordovician plant life, on the other hand, with minimal productivity and biomass and patchy cover, had limited scope for exerting such effects. Early land plants may have increased the respiratory generation of carbon dioxide and carbonic acid in shallow soils but fossil soils of that time suggest it had little effect on weathering effects prior to the evolution of vascular plants. See Jutras, P., LeForte, M.J. & Hanley, J.J. (2015) Record of climatic fluctuations and high pH weathering conditions in a thick
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48. Bennett, E. & Elser, J. (2011) A broken biogeochemical cycle. Nature, 478, 29–31.
49. See Gross, M. (2010) Fears over phosphorus supplies. Current Biology, 20, R386–7.
50. Gosling, P. et al. (2006) Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi and organic farming. Agriculture Ecosystem and Environment, 113, 17–35.
51. See Bennett & Elser (2011).
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56. Detailed reconstructions of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels for Permo-
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8. Eden under siege
1. Butchart, S.H.M. et al. (2010) Global biodiversity: indicators of recent declines. Science, 328, 1164–8.