
Nitrogen-fixing trees “eat” rocks, play pivotal role in forest health - ph0rque
https://today.oregonstate.edu/news/nitrogen-fixing-trees-%E2%80%9Ceat%E2%80%9D-rocks-play-pivotal-role-forest-health
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Nydhal
Nitrogen fixation is an important part of permaculture. Oregon State offers an
online certificate in the subject.
[https://pace.oregonstate.edu/catalog/permaculture-design-
cer...](https://pace.oregonstate.edu/catalog/permaculture-design-certificate-
online)

~~~
2sk21
Permaculture is going to become a very important subject for study. I have
recently gotten interested in the subject and the results have been amazing
even in very unpromising conditions. Geoff Lawtons work in Jordan is
inspiring:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xcZS7arcgk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xcZS7arcgk)

~~~
zeristor
Greening the desert, I've been following that for months, after watching the
Oregon YouTube channel on permaculture. I've just spent an hour following up
on Managed Aquifer Recharge, albeit not entirely relevant in my part of
Europe.

To bring it back to HN, I keep thinking there must be ways to model
landscapes, and planting strategies to increase permaculture efficiency,
although probably the antithesis of permaculture.

The issue seems to be putting plants together so they can support each other
in close quarters, sounds like an optimisation problem to me, I've called it
augmented permaculture before.

~~~
ph0rque
Your description of an app for designing / modeling edible landscapes with
permaculture principles in mind is exactly what I am working on:
[https://automicrofarm.com/app/](https://automicrofarm.com/app/)

In fact, I thought about creating a "digital twin" for your edible landscape,
and wrote about it here: [https://automicrofarm.com/blog/2018/11/digital-
twin.html](https://automicrofarm.com/blog/2018/11/digital-twin.html)

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JohnL4
Underground rocks are not static.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saprolite](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saprolite)

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viburnum
In the lowland northwest, red alder is typically the first tree to get
established after a disturbance.

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mudil
Interesting fact is that red alder trees are used for fancy furniture, and
it's the wood used in Fender Stratocaster guitars. It's also probably the best
wood for smoking fish.

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kazinator
Boy what clickbait! :)

 _" red alder ... through its symbiotic relationship with nitrogen-fixing
bacteria"_

That's more like it. No such thing as a nitrogen-fixing tree, as far as we
know; only micro-organisms perform nitrogen fixation.

~~~
strainer
Its not clickbait, its just efficient language. We have a symbiotic
relationship with bacteria in our gut but don't explicitly distinguish it
every time we refer to human digestion.

Actually this article and study is not intending to reveal anything new about
how trees and other plants fix nitrogen (using microbes). It is revealing that
the symbiotic arrangements (far from entirely understood) also cause the
breakdown and release of scarce nutrients from rocks, enabling increased
growth and building soil fertility over time.

~~~
kazinator
We wouldn't say that a people perform some very specific, detailed process
that is attributed to gut bacteria. E.g. "humans break down oligosaccharides".

Digestion, as such, is a concept independent of gut bacteria.

