September 27, 2019
sprep-pa
Thomas Crowther wants to restore the planet, but first he needs to know how many trees, fungi, worms and microbes live on it...Crowther’s maps are bouncing onto the pages of leading science journals — five so far this year in Science and Nature alone — and he has just won the British Ecological Society’s Founder’s Prize. His fans say he is part of a new wave in ecological research, using machine learning on vast, scattered data sets to tease out broad patterns about the state of the planet. His critics think he is trampling on nuance and oversimplifying — sometimes dangerously so.
