Talk on Forest, Sea, and Climate Change

Coastal forests have a strong link to the sea.\Photo by Molly Sultany.

The Hatfield Marine Science Center’s Thursday Research Seminar Series continues online in 2022.  On Thursday, Jan. 13, at 3:30 p.m., the seminar being offered bears the intriguing title, “Should we bury our forests in the bottom of the ocean to fight climate change?”

The speaker is Francisco Guerrero, a PhD candidate in the College of Forestry at Oregon State University.  He is an aquatic biologist who is pursuing his doctorate in sustainable forest management and water resources science.

His description of his talk:

“The lush forests wrapping the coastal mountains in Pacific Northwest have been planetary climate safeguards for millennia. The coupling between the terrestrial and coastal ecosystems makes our region a center for the burial of carbon absorbed from the atmosphere. But this balance might change depending on how we decide to manage our lands, particularly old-growth forests. As we learn about the transport of particulate organic carbon along our rivers, we find new reasons for better management and conservation of our unique ecosystems at the land-ocean interface.”

The registration link for this event is not yet available.  Watch for it here.