Science AMA Series: I'm Tom Crowther, a Scientist from Yale University and the Netherlands Institute of Ecology. My research shows how human activity affects ecosystems worldwide, leading to global climate change. AMA!

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Along with providing many of the services that support human life and wellbeing, terrestrial ecosystems help us in the fight against climate change by absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere. But our unsustainable use of the Earth's resources is beginning to threaten the health of those ecosystems, limiting their capacity to store carbon. I study how the world's trees and soils are changing under the influence of human activity, and the consequences of these changes for on-going climate change.

In 2016, we published a paper revealing that atmospheric warming will drive the loss of approximately 55 gigatonnes of carbon from the soil into the atmosphere by 2050, with the potential to accelerate climate change by 17% on top of current expectations. We also showed that there are over 3 trillion trees on Earth which are able to absorb much of this carbon, but their capacity to do so is being hindered by the loss of ~10 billion trees each year caused by deforestation, fire and disease/pests. Understanding and preserving these terrestrial ecosystems at a global scale is absolutely critical in the fight against poverty and climate change.

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">Science AMA Series: I'm Tom Crowther, a Scientist from Yale University and the Netherlands Institute of Ecology. My research shows how human activity affects ecosystems worldwide, leading to global climate change. AMA!