The Earthshot Institute is a non-profit organization that brings people across disciplinary and institutional boundaries to collaborate on scientific research that will catalyze regeneration of social-ecological systems. They pursue their mission by forming Earthshot Institute Labs, highly interdisciplinary teams that work closely for a circumscribed period to achieve a clearly defined goal. On November 10th, they will launch a new lab in an area that may be of interest to members of this community.
The Assisted Forest Regeneration (AFR) Lab, led by Leland Werden, of ETH Zürich, is organizing an effort to pull together the vast, highly distributed knowledge on assisted regeneration of forests. Leland’s AFR Lab will look beyond the published literature, into the many sources of data and wisdom present in multiple languages around the globe. The Earthshot Institute would like to gather a linguistically diverse group of individuals who have some familiarity with a subject such as tree planting, regeneration, forestry, or forest ecology. This volunteer team will be asked to search for sources that are not widely known or cataloged, but do contain potentially useful data on regenerative interventions in forests. Upon identifying a potentially useful source, participants will write a very brief summary of what data the source contains. Active participants in this process will become members of a named consortium, which will appear as an author of the review paper that Leland hopes will emerge from this work; all individual members of the consortium will be listed in a published appendix or supplement to the review.
If this effort seems like something you might be interested in joining, please register for the upcoming Lab Launch event on November 10 to learn more. If you are interested in joining but are unable to make that date, or have any questions at all, please just send a note to team@earthshot.institute.