Walk into the woods and you are bound to find standing dead trees, otherwise known as snags. Here's what you may not know about them.

Dead trees do all of that and more. In terms of food, a dead tree is prime habitat for insects and fungi that help return the tree to the soil, recycling the nutrients in the limbs, trunk and roots.

Well, for starters, because bristlecones live where practically nothing else can, little competition exists for water and nutrients. Bristlecone pines can liberally spread their roots and expand ...

A tree stump that should be dead is still alive; here's why Date: July 25, 2019 Source: Cell Press Summary: Within a shrouded New Zealand forest, a tree stump keeps itself alive by holding onto ...

Large patches of dead and dying trees are seen in the Sierra Nevada mountains from a helicopter tour Tuesday, Dec. 1, 2015. Mostly ponderosa and sugar pine trees are dying off in large numbers ...

In a New Zealand forest, a near-dead tree stump (left) clings to life by sucking up nutrients from its neighbor’s roots at night. These two trees could be part of a "superorganism" of connected ...

A tree stump that should have died is being kept alive by neighbouring trees that are funnelling water and nutrients to it through an interconnected root system. The finding adds to a growing ...

Get rid of all dead, diseased wood, crisscrossing branches and shoots growing straight up. They'll be fruitless and rob nutrients the trees need to produce the desired fruit.

I think that the dead leaves will eventually rot and put nutrients back into the soil. I should also mention that I have bark mulch ground cover, which may slow down disintegration of the leaves.

We have two types of woodlands around here. The first is natural, intact stretches littered with downed logs, decomposing, returning nutrients to the soil. Snags (standing dead trees) riddled with ...