A tree in the forest

Speaking of networks... this is an amazing photo shot by the Swedish photographer Jocke Berglund I stumbled across yesterday:

Hurricane tree   © by Jocke Berglund
It's called Hurricane tree, and it has won the first prize in the The World in Our Hands category of the Adult awards for the Shell Wildlife Photographer of the Year in 2006.

It shows a spot in a Swedish forest which was hit by a storm in January 2005. This spot had the shape of a tree, and the heavy forestry machines which retrieved the scrambled logs created the curious pattern in the ground, resembling the trunc and the branching boughs. The grass under the tree is made of piles of logs.

t's a coincidence that the spot where the storm cut down the trees has the shape of a tree. But there is probably a subtle reason that the structure of the branching paths of the machines is so similar to the trunc and branches of a tree: both cover, starting from the root, the area of the whole "tree" in a very similar way. It's all networks!