Jenny McElwain

speaker

162 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 2 Jul

Jenny McElwain’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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In Our Time · The Evolution of Trees · 2 Jul 2026 podcast

They change the complexity of how everything interacts.

And they...

This is just above ground.

Below ground, they're doing the same.

So they're extracting elements from rocks, building soil, building relationships with fungi.

So per unit space, trees add complexity and they engineer space and climates and resources for other plants to come in and other animals and fungi, other groups to come in.

Yeah, that's such a great question.

And I actually think nobody can answer it, yes.

So I think this is really an active area of research for plant scientists in all disciplines.

And we really need to know

which trees are going to be resilient in the face of climate change in the future?

And there's lots of ways of answering those questions.

You can come from lots of different disciplines and answer in different ways.

But I suppose thinking of my own research area, we know from looking back at the fossil record at times of natural global warming in the past, so this would be caused by volcanism, that if you push the climate too far and too warm,

We know that trees have limits.

So you push the climate beyond their niche or their adapted envelope and they suddenly disappear.

And we don't see them as fossils anymore.

And instead we see the really ancient plants thrive like ferns and those mosses that we talked about in the early phase of the earth.

So what we do know is that trees, all trees have limits.

And we see this if you go to the Arctic today or the Antarctic, there are no trees.

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