Dr. Sam Illingworth reads his poem The Ancient Resilience of Trees. Poem 4. Find the video of the poem here.
This collaboration is the first in a series of ideaXme collaborations with scientists, innovators and artists who move the human story forward.
Dr. Sam Illingworth, PhD. Atmospheric Physics, is an Associate Professor in Academic Practice at Edinburgh University in the UK. His work and research focus on using poetry and games to develop dialogue between different audiences.
The Ancient Resilience of Trees:
This poem is inspired by recent research, which has found that ancient trees are essential for forest survival. Old and ancient trees are those trees that are many times older than the average individual age of a forest. The importance of such trees in forested ecosystems has been previously shown to be extremely diverse, ranging from providing long-term habitats for endangered species to sequestering large amounts of carbon from the atmosphere. However, despite the essential role that these trees provide, there remains in general a poor understanding of tree age structure in forested ecosystems. In part this is because the longevity of such trees means that they outlive even the most long-term scientific study, while there are also several difficulties in the actual methods that are used to perform the dating processes themselves. For example, among tropical tree species in seasonal climates, growth rings are not as tightly linked to annual cycles as they are in other regions, making such readings difficult to interpret. As such, the most reliable methods require complex, time-consuming studies, that are rarely performed over an entire forest or population of trees. In this new study, researchers used a model based on observed mortality rates to obtain the age distribution for a large number of old and ancient trees in different forested ecosystems. These modelled results were then found to closely match other results that had been obtained from reliable observational studies. As well as helping to better determine the proportion of trees that reach large ages (for example, one quarter of tress were found to reach ages that are three to four times greater than the median age), this research also helped to clarify how old and ancient trees help to sustain the entire population of a forest’s ability to adapt to a rapidly changing environment. These trees have survived a large number of environmental changes over hundreds or thousands of years, and in turn, this genetic resilience is passed on to the forest, thereby helping to make it more resilient. Given that old and ancient trees cannot be replaced through restoration or regeneration for many centuries, it is essential that they are protected to preserve their invaluable diversity and benefits to the forests that they inhabit.
Video credits: Video footage from Canva.
Photographs: https://mortonarb.org/?fbclid=IwAR2pQ…
Voice over for ideaXme introduction: Neil Koenig former Senior BBC producer and journalist and current ideaXme board advisor and guest interviewer.
Music for ideaXme introduction: Music: Space Heroes by MaxKoMusic | https://maxkomusic.com/ Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported https://creativecommons.org/licenses/…
Research on which the poem is based: https://www.nature.com/articles/s4147…
Links to Dr. Illingworth’s audio podcast and social media:
Find all of his poems in this series:
https://thepoetryofscience.scienceblo… https://scipoetry.podbean.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/samillingworth?re…
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/consiliencej…
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