In contrast to what some reforestation programmes and commercial forestry seem to think, forests aren't just collections of identical trees, they are complex ecosystems with characteristic diversity in plant species as well as in everything else. Big data now enables researchers to analyse that complexity in detail on a global scale and work out how forests successfully spread around the world in relatively short time (less than 1/10 of the age of the Earth) and how humanity is reversing that spread in an even shorter time.
Read all about it in my latest feature, which is out now:
The rise and fall of global forests
Current Biology Volume 28, Issue 6, 19 March 2018, Pages R245–R248
FREE access to full text and PDF download
As I used the ginkgo as an example of a tree that lost its ecological context, this was a good excuse to use one of my own photos - taken at the top end of John Garne Way, Oxford Brookes University.
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