Forests are one of the most important ways our planet regulates its climate. It’s simple: Trees remove carbon from the atmosphere and store it. Older forests tend to store more carbon than younger ones, and a single big tree can add the same amount of carbon to the forest within a year as is contained in an entire midsized tree. Understanding the world’s forest systems is an essential factor in building a picture of our planet’s health. Forest ecologists can do this by walking through the forests they study and gathering data on each and every tree. One of those forest-walkers is Kristina Anderson-Teixeira, leader of the Ecosystems and Climate Initiative for Smithsonian’s Forest Global Earth Observatory (ForestGEO), which monitors more than 6 million trees around the world.
How Scientists Study Forests
Gathering data on the health of a forest is a surprisingly monumental task. ForestGEO monitors 65 forests in 28 countries; the 6 million–plus trees within those forests represent about 10,000 different species, with size of each forest-monitoring plot in the network varying from 50 to 100 acres. In each of those plots, a scientist has…