In a woodland in Staffordshire, rings of pipes have been pumping extra carbon dioxide over 180-year-old oak trees every growing season since 2017, giving scientists a rare, decade-long window into how mature forests might behave in a warmer, more carbon-rich future. The facility, known as BIFoR FACE and run by the University of Birmingham, raises CO2 levels inside its treatment rings to around 573 parts per million, close to what the whole atmosphere is projected to reach by the 2050s, compared to roughly 424 parts per million in untreated control rings nearby. After six years of this treatment, researchers found the fumigated oaks had grown noticeably more wood than their neighbours, but that raised an old and stubborn question in forest science: where was the extra nitrogen needed to build all that wood actually coming from? The answer researchers uncovered turned out to hinge not on any external nitrogen source, but on how the trees themselves were quietly reshaping underground microbial activity to unlock nutrients that had previously remained largely out of reach.
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