If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around, does in make a sound? That's the age old question, and the answer is yes! It's a calling to the forest creatures to come and do their recycling part.

Dormant fungi within the tree awaken to feast on it, joined by others that creep up from the soil. Bacteria pitch in, some sliding along strands of fungi to get deeper into the log. Termites alert their colony mates, which gather en masse to gobble up wood. Bit by bit, deadwood is decomposed, feeding new life along the way.

Yet breaking down wood — one of the toughest organic materials — is easier said than done, and scientists still have much to learn about the vital ecological process. Some are studying the tricks fungi and other microbes use to digest wood, and the ways that animals harness this skill for their own benefit. Others are tallying deadwood’s roles in recycling organic matter and stabilizing the global climate. What they’re learning is beginning to lay bare the complex interactions playing out inside expired trees.

“Just because it’s dead doesn’t mean it still doesn’t have a huge function in the ecosystem,” says ecologist Amy Zanne of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in New York state. Yet the amount of deadwood has been declining in many woodlands around the world, and with it, the vital life-giving role it plays.

While it may take years to decompose, there's actually a lot happening on dead trees. Microbes are fighting a turf war for their space, insects are breaking down the wood, and in many cases it even becomes a home for other forest creatures. 

While recent years have seen growing appreciation for the important role of living trees for the planet’s health and biodiversity, dead trees are a harder sell. Yet those decaying trees are vital to the forest’s natural circular economy, in which the dead are recycled into the living.