Secret Science Club explores the “wood wide web” with global ecologist Thomas Crowther.
“Doors” to the Zoom Room will open at 1:30PM (Eastern Time USA)
Shhh… everyone on our mailing list will be emailed the Zoom link the night before. (To join the Secret Science Club mailing list, send us an email.)
There is a reason woodlands are the settings of so many fairy tales. A functioning forest is misty, mossy, age-old, and mysterious. It’s not only the trees with their legions of leaves sheltering untold plant and animal species, but multitudes of microbes hidden in the soil – everything working together, with countless connecting threads, absorbing rain and nutrients, exhaling vapor and oxygen. Magical? No question. Unquantifiable? Maybe not. Global ecologist Thomas Crowther wants to count and map it all.
Thomas Crowther estimates there are 3 trillion trees on the planet and that before humans and agriculture came along, there were 3 trillion more. He calculates that in the world’s soils, there are 430 quintillion nematodes – tiny creatures that play an outsize role in storing carbon and mitigating climate change. He’s mapped webs of underground organisms that nourish the roots of 28,000 tree species across the planet. The way Dr. Crowther figures it, the more we know about these global ecosystems, the better to fight biodiversity loss and climate change.
BEFORE AND AFTER
–Mix up our brunch-time cocktail, the Lorax… (recipe to come!)
–Prepare to groove to our leafed-out playlist
–Bring your questions for the live Q&A
Thomas Crowther is a a global ecosystem ecologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich). He directs the Crowther Lab, a multidisciplinary group of scientists that researches forests and their relationship to Earth’s carbon cycle. Last year, he received the British Ecological Society’s Founders’ Prize. He and his work have been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, National Geographic, Rolling Stone, and on the BBC, NPR, and CNN. He is scientific advisor to the United Nations Trillion Trees Campaign and the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration.
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What’s next at Secret Science Club online?
Stay tuned for Neuroscientist Wendy Suzuki on Tuesday, November 17!
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