Speaker: Francisco Guerrero, College of Forestry, Oregon State University

Topic: Should we bury our forests in the bottom of the ocean to fight climate change?

The lush forests wrapping the coastal mountains in Pacific Northwest have been planetary climate safeguards for millennia. The coupling between the terrestrial and coastal ecosystems makes our region a center for the burial of carbon absorbed from the atmosphere. But this balance might change depending on how we decide to manage our lands, particularly old-growth forests. As we learn about the transport of particulate organic carbon along our rivers, we find new reasons for better management and conservation of our unique ecosystems at the land-ocean interface.