Day 0

I officially start my PhD tomorrow (!!), so today is day 0. Naturally, I've procrastinated from doing some of the other more boring, admin-y things by spending half a day deciding on a name for this blog.

So, what's with the name epicorm? 

Well, the forests I study are Eucalyptus forests. Eucalyptus is a large genus, with species that have diversified and adapted to live all over Australia. The main Eucalyptus species that I study is Eucalyptus diversicolor, commonly known as the karri tree. At up to 90 metres tall, karri are the third tallest flowering plant in the world, and they're found nowhere else on earth except for a small corner of southwestern Australia. 

Karri trees look like this:

In fact, that's one of my field sites - it conveniently doubles as a pretty bloody nice place for a picnic. 

Something that karri trees can do, like other species that have lived for millennia in fire-prone environments, is to resprout following fire in order to survive such events. Karri trees can resprout because they have evolved special buds under their thick bark called epicormics. These epicormic buds lie dormant until the tree undergoes some sort of stress that removes a significant amount of its leaf canopy (this is usually due to fire, but can also happen after severe drought, disease, extensive herbivory or pruning). The epicormic buds then spring into life and rapidly cover the trunk and branches of the tree in what looks like a woolly green jumper:

These new leaves enable the trees to get the energy they need to re-grow their canopies, which they can do within a few years. The epicormic growth then dies away and the trees look almost identical to how they looked before the fire.

Epicormic buds are a really cool adaptation to living in a fire-prone environment. They protect karri forest ecosystems by making trees extremely resilient to fire, and are just quietly hanging out most of the time, waiting to regenerate and save the day. 

Hooray for epicormic buds!