School of forestry and environmental studies

School Notes: School of the Environment
November/December 2015

Ingrid C. “Indy” Burke | http://environment.yale.edu

Dean to leave F&ES

F&ES dean Peter Crane has announced that he will step down after the 2015–16 academic year. Crane, who is also an eminent plant scientist and professor of botany, will become president of the newly created Oak Spring Garden Foundation, a Virginia-based institution that will facilitate scholarship and public dialogue on the uses, history, and future of plants. Last year, he received the 2014 International Prize for Biology for his work on the evolutionary history of plants. He came to F&ES in 2009. “It’s hard to express what an exhilarating privilege it has been for me to be part of this great university and the best professional school of the environment anywhere in the world,” he said in a message to the F&ES community. “It will be an enormous wrench to leave behind the wonderful F&ES community with its outstanding staff and faculty, inspiring students, incomparable alumni, and dedicated supporters.”

Study reveals more trees on Earth than previously believed

A recent Yale-led study estimated that there are more than 3 trillion trees on Earth, about seven and a half times more than previous estimates. But the total number of trees has plummeted by about 46 percent since the start of human civilization. The results, published in the journal Nature, provide the most comprehensive assessment of tree populations ever produced and offer new insights into a class of organism that helps shape most terrestrial biomes. The new insights can improve the modeling of many large-scale systems, from carbon cycling and climate change models to the distribution of animal and plant species, said Thomas Crowther, a former Yale Climate & Energy Institute postdoctoral fellow at F&ES. “Trees are among the most prominent and critical organisms on Earth,” Crowther said, “yet we are only recently beginning to comprehend their global extent and distribution.” The study, which was covered by media organizations across the world, was the result of collaboration by researchers from 15 countries, including 14 from the Yale community. (For a Yale Alumni Magazine report on the study, see page 32.)

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