A giant from the Amazon spotted after years of research, a species famous for its exotic wood. Details from Hervé Poirier, editor-in-chief of the scientific magazine Epsiloon.
franceinfo: What does this giant look like?
Herve Poirier: A Brazilian researcher who participated in the expedition speaks “of one of the most beautiful things he had ever seen, simply divine”. But hey, frankly, it looks like a normal tree. It’s a dinizia excelsa, a species famous for its exotic wood and abundantly cut. It is more than 400 years old – analyzes are in progress – and it is 88.50 meters high, a 30-storey building: the Amazonian record.
It was spotted in 2019 on satellite images in the Iratapuru River Nature Reserve in northern Brazil. After four failures, it took two weeks of treks through the wildest jungle for a group of scholars and environmentalists to finally see it, touch it.
Well, we can ask ourselves: what good is all this effort?
It’s just a taller tree sticking out of the canopy. Yes, but not only. To stand in front of this tree is to question our relations with the other great power on the planet: are these large trees which dominate their forest disappearing?
Because yes, large trees are more threatened than others. By direct cutting (for their wood or the land they occupy), by the fragmentation of forests (the smaller the forest, the more fragile the large trees are in the face of storms and lightning), but also by global warming ( an experiment conducted in the Amazon has shown that the impact of drought is 5 times more deleterious for large trees than for others).
Many researchers are therefore worried about the possible disappearance of these plant colossi which play a key role in forests. Not just because they harbor a rich ecosystem or because they store a lot of CO2: it is above all their role for the entire forest which is currently the subject of fascinating work.
A large tree, an old tree, is an individual that has shown a remarkable ability to overcome adversity, to survive extreme and varied climatic events: it therefore has a valuable genetic heritage for new shoots. A crucial point for the management of forests, everywhere in the world. It is in the face of this, finally, that the Amazonian giant puts us: as in the Lord of the Rings of Tolkien, it is perhaps on the alliance between humans and tall trees that the preservation of the world depends…