Suzanne Simard worked with students and a postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Teresa “Sm’hayetsk” Ryan of the Tsimshian nation in the Bella Bella region of British Columbia. Teresa was both a traditional basket weaver and fisheries scientist. As an aboriginal person she was keenly interested in whether or not the restoration of fishing practices using stone traps that had been banned in the area by early colonial powers could reinvigorate the salmon fishery that had been devastated after colonial powers assumed jurisdiction over those fisheries more than a century ago. At the same time, she wanted to know if a return to traditional methods of fishing might also reinvigorate the cedars of the regions by augmenting their food supply with carcasses of salmon. This could be beneficial to the forests communities as well as the people that were also part of those communities.

In that same inlet scientists from the University of Victoria and Simon Fraser University had discovered nitrogen rings of cedar and Sitka spruce  and in plants , insects, and soils. They had learned that the nitrogen came from the carcasses of salmon from the ocean carried by bears carried to the forest where they ate part of the salmon but not all. Salmon is an incredibly rich food source as bears, eagles, and humans had learned.

Each bear, they learned, preying on spawning salmon, transported on average 150 salmon per day into the forest! As a result, “the roots of the trees foraged for the decaying protein and nutrients, the salmon flesh providing more than three-quarters of the tree’s nitrogen needs.” The scientists could analyze the trees and determine from where their nitrogen came. That was one of the reasons Simard said she was a “forest detective.” Simard said, “Scientists could use the year-by-year variation in tree-ring nitrogen to find correlations between salmon populations, and changing climate, deforestation, and shifting fisheries practices. An old cedar tree could hold a thousand-year-record of salmon runs.”

In the process of doing this work much to her amazement, Suzanne Simard had to overcome the skepticism of her scientific peers and her own personal shyness and in doing so she became an international scientific star, providing a Ted talk, podcasts, National Geographic film, and reached thousands of people around the world. I first heard her on CBC radio and then read her famous book that became a best-seller. A best-seller about trees can you imagine that. Yet, that was not all, her concept of the Mother Tree made it into the film Avatar where millions of people heard of it.

It was amazing what the forest detectives could learn. It would make Crime Scene Investigators look modest. The main thing they learned was that everything in the forests was connected. Nothing was isolated. Connection was everything.

The forest detectives provided scientific proof for what indigenous people had known for millennia!