Around the world, scientists and engineers are inventing clever ways to study life in the rainforest canopy. The following is an excerpt from a story that appeared in Frontiers--the electronic newsletter of the National Science Foundation. You can read the rest of the story and see some dizzy pictures of Nalini Nadkarni at
www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/news/publicat/frontier/12-97/12treetop.htm.
Until recently, the forest canopy was considered one of the last frontiers of natural science-so close, yet impossible to reach unless your scientific prowess happened to include rope-swinging. But now researchers ascend to the treetops in such T.rex-tall contrivances as canopy cranes, an extension of the telephone repairperson's cherry-picker bucket device. As chair of the scientific committee for the Wind River Canopy Crane, one such crane currently in use in the Pacific Northwest, Nadkarni helps decide which experiments should be done from the crane. But, she says, she still enjoys tree-climbing inch-by-wormlike-inch.
"Another continent of life remains to be discovered, not upon the earth, but one to two hundred feet above it," wrote naturalist and explorer William Beebe almost 80 years ago. "There awaits a rich harvest for the naturalist who overcomes the obstacles-gravitation, ants, thorns, rotten trunks-and mounts to the summits."
Nalini Nadkarni has certainly overcome those obstacles. She's now president of a group of scientists known as the International Canopy Network (ICAN). ICAN, created in 1994, facilitates communication among individuals and institutions concerned with research, education and conservation of tree crowns and forest canopies.
For more about scientists in the treetops--
mongabay.com--Tropical Rainforests
www.mongabay.com/0402.htm
U.S. Forest Service, Wind River Experimental Forest
http://donb.furfly.net/canopy_crane.html |
