Putting the science fiction into science

I'm researching trees and forests for my next novel.  In that story the trees are going to be highly intelligent creatures who talk to each other, the animals around them, and the human colonists who land on the planet.

I have a big forest as the centrepiece of the planet, so the wood-wide web was the obvious way for the trees to communicate.  I thought I'd be clever,  I'd have the humans communicate with the trees via the mycelium, which would, as well as carrying nutrients to the trees, also transmit electrical signals.

Great idea, but it isn't  fictional.  Research has shown that trees send electrical signals along the mycelium they're attached to.  So where was my SF element going to come from?  Well, those signals travel at the speed of a third of an inch a second.  It's hardly the high-speed internet my humans need in order to converse with the trees.  So I speeded it up.

Trees don't communicate using the words of language.  So I can get these intelligent trees using language.  If the humans tap a line into the mycelium, which I'm going to make much bigger and rope-like on this world, the electrical signals can be sent to a pad and turned into language.  For the sake of the story I'm going to be hand-waving about how the trees have managed to learn humans' language.  They learned it from the humans who were here before, thus neatly sidestepping several years of exhausting work for the colonists.

Trees communicate using scent to warn their neighbours of inset attacks.  Their neighbours then pump toxic chemicals into their leaves for defence.  So what if I made my telepathic big cats able to read the trees' scent language?  Some of the humans are also telepaths and can talk to the cats, so that gives me another nice communication triangle.

So this is the way the planet will work with humans to defend itself against the bad humans who want to come in and destroy the planet's ecology.  And that's not counting the mysterious pile of silicon cylinders on the river bank.  Could they really be poo?

I've had fun putting the science fiction into science for this novel.  It's challenged me more than I thought it would, because so much I thought was SF is already actual scientific fact.