Renowned Canopy Biologist Talks About Trees

Dec. 1, 2016, 6:45 a.m. ·

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Trees in eastern Nebraska. (Photo by Ariana Brocious, NET News)

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Nalini Nadkarni is a canopy biologist and professor of biology at the University of Utah. Her work also includes outreach projects with prisoners, dancers, poets, and different communities of faith. She recently spoke at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln as part of the Nebraska Statewide Arboretum’s Young Memorial Lecture series. NET News talked with Nadkarni about her work and our human connection with trees.


NET NEWS: You're a canopy biologist. Can you describe what that is?

NALINI NADKARNI: A canopy biologist is someone who tries to understand the life that lives in the treetops. The plants and animals that live high above the forest floor. And in a place like Nebraska, you might say, then what the heck is she studying? But when you go to the tropics, or to temperate rainforests like in Washington State, the moisture and the temperature and so forth allow plants and animals to live in in the forest canopy that you would never encounter on the forest floor. So it constitutes an area for biologists of real exploration. But until about 30 years ago it was really an unknown area—it was called the last biotic frontier. And of course whenever you get an unknown place, a scientist wants to go there to study it.

NET NEWS: And so what have you learned from studying the tree canopies? What findings have you had?

NADKARNI: The primary finding is that the microenvironment of the forest canopy is really different from what you find on the forest floor. If I took you on a walk through the rainforest in Costa Rica where I work, for example, it would be kind of moist and damp and dark and you wouldn't feel any wind and it would be a very constant temperature. But if I took you up into the canopy, 150 feet above, you would see that it was a really different microenvironment. Much more sunlight. Greater extremes of relative humidity and of temperature. Lots more wind up there. It's almost like the atmosphere of an open field here in Nebraska. And for that reason, you get this cadre of plants and animals that have adapted to life in the tree tops. It's as if you were sort of in a different world.

Nalini Nadkarni, biology professor at the University of Utah.

(Photo courtesy of University of Utah)

NET NEWS: So what do you think trees can teach us, generally speaking, about ecology or different places around the world?

NADKARNI: Because they are rooted in one place, because they can't run away when the environment changes but have to adapt somehow, what they are, in many ways, are indicators. And so I think what we learn from them is, what was the environment like here, and how might they react if there's a change in environment? So trees are really very important pieces of the puzzle in terms of understanding things like climate change. They give us clues into past history, long past history, not just the last decade but centuries and millennia, helping us learn about the dynamics about environmental change and how living things like trees can respond or not respond to that change.

NET NEWS: You work as a scientist and a professor, but you're also involved in a number of outreach projects and endeavors that are focused around nature and ecology. One of those focuses on the intersection of faith and trees. Where do you see that intersection and why do you think it's meaningful or valuable for people to examine?

NADKARNI: The reason I got interested in that is because I began pondering the fact that about 80 percent of the people on our globe self-identify as being religious or spiritual. And the number of people who identify themselves as being inspired by environmentalism is far smaller. And it just seemed to me, not that religious or spiritual people don't care about the environment; obviously people who are religious do, but it seemed that trying to understand the relationship of spirituality and religion with trees in particular and the environment more generally would be a very important point of intersection to connect science and nature with religion.

As an ecologist, I know that trees are incredibly important in terms of carbon sequestration, in terms of providing fruits and flowers for animals, in terms of stabilizing soil, those are all ecological values that me and my fellow scientists can easily document, and we have. But how do we link that to religious values or people who hold religious values, who might not want to hear about climate change or who might not want to hear about soil stabilization? So that's why I decided to go to the Bible, the Torah, the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, Buddhist stories, and take from them the lessons that that religion had to say about trees and forests. And I put together a sermon about trees and spirituality and I started knocking on church doors and synagogue doors and just sort of offering this sermon as something that I could present to these congregations, not as a scientist trying to cram scientific values down the throats of religious people but rather saying, I'm a scientist who's really interested in trees and I decided to read your holy scriptures as my authoritative text.

The more we can find common ground as people who believe in religion and identify that with those who identify with science, the better chance there is of reconciling some of these larger environmental questions like climate change, invasive species and so forth.

NET NEWS: During one of your TED Talks you showed a slide of an image of a human heart that had what looked like trees in the veins. Do you know why we love trees so much?

NADKARNI: Gosh, it seems to be such a universal thing, isn't it? I don't know of a stronger relationship. Sometimes when I sit in the forest canopy, I feel like I am home. And it's ironic because I feel really safe up there whereas if I fell, I could just kill myself. And it may have to do with our evolution. That in fact, we as primates did evolve in the canopy, in the savannas of Africa. And that when we were in trees we were safe from these predators that were walking around on the savanna floor. I think also the fact that trees are everywhere, that we see them everywhere, they are in our blood vessels, our lungs, rivers are like trees. And so that image of the human heart with its vasculature of blood vessels that look exactly like trees demonstrates this idea that humans and trees are just inextricably intertwined.


Nalini Nadkarni spoke at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln on November 4th, 2016 as part of the Nebraska Statewide Arboretum's Young Memorial Lecture Series. Watch the full lecture below: