Treenauts Spy on Canopy Communities
Wed, 23 Jun 2010 4:34 pm – Posted by Mandy | 1 Comment
Blogger: Forest & Bird’s Web Manager, Mandy Herrick
We touched down on the moon in 1969. We travelled 11kms to the sea-floor in 1960. We peered into living cells and discovered DNA in 1951.
Moon-travel, deep-sea exploration, cell-research, we’ve done it all, and yet, we still know very little about the unexplored communities that live in the tops of our trees.
Although numerous botanists & entomologists have collected samples from these lofty forest communities, it was only in 1995 that scientist, Graham Dorrington, set off in a dirigible (airship) above the forests of Borneo that we really started to crack open this undiscovered world.
Still 15 years on and this tree-top world remains very much unstudied. It’s a sad fact that we know more about what happens 20 metres underwater than we do in the tops of our trees.
However, that’s all changing.
In the past month, Ark in the Park, the New Zealand Geographic Trust, DOC and Auckland University have been building upon the scant research into our tree-top communities by launching insect-o-logists, tree-o-logists and reptile-o-logists into our trees.