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  • NEWS FEATURE

The ecologist who wants to map everything

Thomas Crowther wants to restore the planet, but first he needs to know how many trees, fungi, worms and microbes live on it.
  1. Aisling Irwin

    1. Aisling Irwin is a freelance journalist in Oxfordshire, UK.

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Thomas Crowther at his lab at ETH Zurich

Credit: Daniel Auf der Mauer for Nature

Thomas Crowther bursts barefoot from his office into the corridor, sweating through his faded T-shirt and grinning with exhilaration. It’s a warm July day and he has just finished telling NBC News that Earth could sustain another 1.2 trillion trees, which would absorb 200 gigatonnes of carbon, and that the next thing to do is to “stop talking and start planting”. His claim, based on figures published that day in Science1, comes from the latest in a string of high-profile ecology papers from his laboratory at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich) that have drawn the attention of the world’s media — and Crowther is loving it. Publicity, he believes, will get him closer to his goal, and his goal is nothing less than restoring the planet.

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Nature 573, 478-481 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-02846-4

This article is part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 250 media outlets to highlight the issue of climate change.

References

  1. Bastin, J.-F. et al. Science 365, 76–79 (2019).

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  2. Crowther, T. W. et al. Nature 525, 201–205 (2015).

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  3. van den Hoogen, J. et al. Nature 572, 194–198 (2019).

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  4. Steidinger, B. S. et al. Nature 569, 404–408 (2019).

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  5. Crowther, T. W. et al. Nature 540, 104–108 (2016).

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