Join us for our next quarterly in person meeting + speaker series. Dinner will be provided. This month we welcome forest ecologist, Neil Pederson. When we envision old-growth forests, we likely imagine big trees that overwhelm our notion of being human. Redwoods or Giant Sequoias come to mind, yeah? While big trees are wondrous, they tend to be, as some would say, more of a destination that might obscure the full ecological beauty of old growth forests. Much of that ecological beauty is that old-growth forests represent time. Time immemorial. An amount of time that us humans, even with our extended lifespans, cannot imagine. What happens over these millennia? We only just starting to learn. With this talk I will talk about how we should not always expect big trees, provide a global tour of some of the oldest forests I have been fortunate to visit and study, and touch on how old-growth forests are having their own moment in time (despite being immemorial).

Bio:

Neil Pederson is a forest ecologist at the Harvard Forest studying the dynamics of old-growth forests from individual trees to regional and subcontinental scale. Neil grew up in rural Volney, NY and in the Adirondack Mountains and earned an associate’s degree at SUNY-Morrisville, a bachelor’s degree at SUNY-ESF, a MS at Auburn University, and a PhD at Columbia University. Before working at the Harvard Forest, Neil was an assistant professor in biology at Eastern Kentucky University and a research professor at Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory.

Neil has studied climate change and disturbance ecology in Mongolia, Bhutan, China, Spain, Turkey, the Republic of Georgia, and over much of the eastern US. Currently, Neil is studying the impacts of extreme climate on the lives of trees in the Northeastern US forests and old-growth forests in the US.