- Welcome to "Science Pub", monthly lecture series exploring the exciting scientific world around us.

I'm your host, Nancy Coddington, Director of Science content for WSKG public media.

We are excited to be back this Fall with a new look and a new platform.

So bear with us this evening as we try out all of these new tools.

Please introduce yourself in the chat and tell us where you're tuning in from.

We have participants from all over the country, attending our events, and we love to hear where you are from.

In the chat also please ask questions to our guest speaker Dr. Margaret Lowman throughout tonight's talk using that feature, and we will do our best to get all of your questions answered tonight.

Tonight's talk is, "Life and The Trees, Discovering The Eighth Continent."

And did you know, that more than 50% of the worlds land-based creatures live in tree tops?

This was a fact that I did not know until I had met Dr. Lowman.

Scientists have classified less than 10% of this biodiversity.

Tonight, we will hear stories that will inspire us to think more urgently about forest conservation, help save big trees, and ultimately keep our planet healthy.

Our guest tonight is Dr. Margaret Lowman, affectionately known throughout the world as "Canopy Meg."

She is a global pioneer in forest canopy ecology, she is one of the world's foremost Arbornauts.

So where astronauts explore outer space, Arbornauts, investigate tree tops.

She explores and studies the vast forest canopies that make up what Meg has termed the Eighth Continent.

Dr. Lowman has been a collector of wild flowers, nests, snakeskins and other natural collectibles all her life, and that led her to becoming one of the world's first Arbornauts.

Her work has taken her to 46 countries across seven continents over the last 40 years.

She has co-chaired five international canopy conferences, authored over 150 scientific publications, she has written numerous books on forest, Science, and sustainability, and is named a "National Geographic" explorer.

So we are so excited to welcome you tonight, welcome Dr. Meg Lowman.

- Oh, thank you, Nancy.

It's such a pleasure to be here and I'm really excited to talk about trees and be the voice for trees.

So should I get my screen share going and- - Well, way before we start that, I do have a couple of questions for you.

So what aspects of your childhood inspired you to become an arbonaut?

- Gosh, that's a great question.

And to be honest, Nancy, I was one of those kids that you probably would call a geek in today's terminology because I loved nature.

And let's face it, in my generation that wasn't such a cool thing to do in a small town in Upstate New York.

So I was a little bit disenfranchised, probably from the rest of the school, but I did all sorts of things outdoors.

I built three-fourths and I had a couple of special friends that shared them with me and I collected bird nests, and as you've mentioned, wild flowers, and snakeskins, and really crazy things.

So that I think gave me a real love for nature.

And I was very shy and didn't live in a town where there was a Smithsonian, or a big natural history museum.

So, I guess the natural world gave me some level of comfort and excitement.

And so it really gave me passion, I think, to seek some sort of career in that field.

And that was kind of what happened in my kid hood.

- Well, it sounds like you created a natural museum for yourself with your private collection.

(both laughing) - I'm afraid I did, my mother was not so happy about that.

(both laughing) - Can you tell me, what is an arbonaut?

- Great question and as you mentioned, you know, astronauts explore outer space.

The word is simple, it's similar, arbonaut using that root word for tree, explore the tops of trees.

And so, I guess for better for worse, I'm one of the world's first Arbornauts, 'cause I helped design toolkit to study the types of trees.

And it's really crazy, but foresters for over 100 years, walked through a forest and looked at the tree trunk and they didn't really see the top of the tree unless it was cut down.

And then of course, most of the birds flew away, or the insects got squished.

So in a sense, Arbornauts opened up this whole tree research rather than just 5% at the bottom of the tree, which in my book I call, it's akin to a doctor studying your big toe and saying, "Okay, your brain, and your eyes, and your ears are really healthy."

And you're scratching your head like, "How could my big toe relate to that?"

So for a long time, I think we studied just the bottom of trees and Arbornauts opened up this new world of studying the entire tree.

- This is really fascinating and I can't wait to hear more.

So Meg why don't you go ahead and begin sharing your screen and all the wonderful information that you have to share with us this evening.

And I would like to remind everyone, as you're joining please do introduce yourself in the chat and please ask your questions for Dr. Lowman, in the chat and we will get to those as we move through this presentation.

- Great, okay, so I'm looking for my screen here, and I'm gonna have to find it, but we'll find it.

The wait, was here before, wasn't it?

- So maybe go to the window option?

- Yeah, let's see, let's get it, share, share screen, and that window option is not coming up right now.

So let me see here, window, okay, now it is, great.

You are so brilliant, Nancy, thank you (laughs).

- Well, I'm glad we're recording that (laughs).

- There you go, can you see it?

- Yes, that looks great, thank you Dr. Lowman, and now please go ahead and start sharing all this wonderful information with us.

- Fantastic, so I wanna talk to everyone a little bit about the "Tops of Trees", And this is the title of my most recent book.

Thanks to Farrar, Straus & Giroux for publishing it because it's full of all the discoveries that we've made at the tops of trees and also some hopeful comments about what we need to do next to save these trees, which is really, really important.

And I do humbly start out the book talking about my childhood.

Nancy just asked a couple of questions, but I really was this geek kid that was very shy and lived in a rural part of Upstate New York and passionately collected wild flowers, as well as many other things, rocks, twigs, you know, snakeskins you name it.

But I did in the end enter my little tiny wildflower collection in the New York state Science fair in grade five and lo and behold, I got a second prize surrounded by boys with their volcano experiments.

Remember when you can pour vinegar into a baking soda volcano and out pops all the stuff, but for better for worse, it really motivated me to try to be better and maybe become a scientist, but I didn't really know any girl scientists, so that was pretty scary.

But I did kind of wanna tell that story at the beginning of my book, because I think it's important that kids know that even if you're really ordinary, like I was, and you live in a really ordinary place, you too could maybe grow up and follow your dreams if you pursue it with a passion.

So I did become one of the world's first Arbornauts.

Here's a group of pictures with all my crazy methods because I founded a new Science in the sense by being one of the first tree top climbers.

I ended up having also to design the tools to get up there, and that included welding a slingshot, and creating a harness with a seatbelt webbing, and borrowing a sewing machine when I was a graduate student.

And, then moving on to design these canopy walkways or aerial bridges and using inflatables and sometimes climbing at night because that's when a lot of the bugs were more active than by day.

So my whole world became almost something of a tool kit designer as well as a discover of what lives in the canopy.

And lo and behold, through my work and a couple other colleagues, we found that, as Nancy mentioned earlier, half of the land-based biodiversity on this planet lives right above your head in the tops of trees.

So this is extraordinary because we never knew that before, about 40 years ago, when the first Arbornauts started exploring the tree tops.

And what's a little disappointing is to realize that probably 90% of that remains undiscovered.

So we only have about 10% under our belts, classified, identified, and understood.

So all you young people out there, there's a huge career for you, please think about becoming an Arbornaut, so you can discover and understand all of these important creatures on our planet that we don't even know about today.

Just a little timeline, how did this world of canopy science evolve?

And again, it's very new, we went to outer space in the 1960s, we studied coral reefs in the 1950s, but it wasn't really until the 1980s that we climb trees and develop methods to go there.

And again, I was one of the first Arbornauts, and I was definitely one of the first people that helped design canopy walkways.

All of this happened in Australia, where I was a graduate student.

And to this day that canopy walkway in Queensland is still wonderfully vibrant and supports hundreds of thousands of peoples a year.

And again, we just had to keep developing techniques to get us up into the tree tops, and safe and very research oriented ways.

Another technique that I was part of in the 1990s was taking construction cranes and transporting them to the tropical rainforest, to the tune of about 10 of these devices existing around the world at this point in time.

So you can go in the bucket of the crane and lo and behold, you can see all the leaves, or all the bugs, or all the lizards, or whatever it is you're trying to discover in the tree tops.

Again, I came back from Australia where I basically, had the better part of my career.

And in 1992, I was a professor at Williams College where I built the first canopy walkway in North America, but limited to students using it, which meant it wasn't really a public opportunity.

And then, I went on to work with some of the international scientists, in France, in Germany, in Italy.

And we developed these incredible inflatables to rise above the canopy and a light on the canopy, which was totally fun, and then, I came back to Florida where I was a Botanical Garden Director and lo and behold created the first public canopy walkway here in Sarasota, Florida, where I live.

And I was just out there this morning, oh my gosh, it was so beautiful at sunrise.

And we had a big rainfall last night and all of the puddles of water under the walkway were glistening.

So it's still, even in this very simple forest to Florida, a stunning, stunning experience to go into the canopy with a walkway.

I founded the Tree Foundation in 2001 because we needed to fund building the walkway in Florida.

And then, we've gone on since then to fund walkways all around the world, especially in very endangered forests that need our help to save this genetic library, as I call it, this amazing group of species that live in every unique forest and in some countries, in some cases they're almost becoming extinct.

So the tree foundation tries to help reverse that by building walkways, and providing local income, and helping the indigenous people understand that it's really better to save the trees and create an income from ecotourism.

So I'll talk a little more about that later.

So finally, that led to this book that just came out a month ago, and I'm really hopeful that people will read it, not just to learn about my crazy careers in Arbornaut, but mostly to understand the importance of trees and why it is that all of us need to save forests in the next 5 or 10 years, not 100 years, but really, really soon.

So that's the book and this is the story.

And I wanna just go on and tell you a couple of the important pillars of my philosophy that are included in the book, of course, but also were a result of my 40 plus years of climbing trees.

And one thing I think that's really important for all of us, especially, you who are listening, is take a kid outdoors.

And even if you don't have your own kids, maybe you can do that with girls Inc, or boys and girls club, or your aunt or uncle, roll with somebody somewhere.

But I think it's really, really important that we get kids into nature and not let them be content with computer screens.

And so over the years, I've had a Megalodon tree tops camp in my hometown which is very economically underprivileged for a lot of families.

And on the right, you can see our beautiful canopy walkway in Sarasota, Florida, where these third graders discovered a new species of weevil just by looking.

And they got to be published like real scientists.

So it shows you that kids everywhere can learn from discovery and exploration if they get to climb a tree and most of you adults have to help that happen.

Another thing in my book that was really personally important to me and probably frustrating to me was the fact that I had a lot of hurdles as a woman in Science.

So I do talk in one chapter about how difficult it was to overcome some of the issues where women weren't so welcome.

You'll see a few images here in the bottom left.

I'm one of about 150 male priests in Ethiopia, where I've been working very closely with them to save their last remaining trees, which exists in the church yards.

And I'll talk about that a little bit later.

And again, all of these expeditions in the top left, my first inflatable expedition, called "Radeau des Cimes" in Cameroon, Africa, had 49 men and 1 woman, and guess who that was.

So at the end of the day, it was always a big challenge to try to climb as well as the boys and produce scientific research as well as the boys, and in my case also be a good mom because I was a single parent, and that was a big challenge for me.

So the glass canopy is out there, the glass ceiling, whatever you wanna call it.

And fig trees were my inspiration, I'm not gonna tell you why you'll have to read the book to find that out.

Another thing I talk about a lot in my book, which is really important for all of us is that the bottom line, if trees disappear, we all die, period.

They keep us alive, absolutely every single day, and they work for us while we sleep; fresh water, they provide oxygen, timber, food, clothing, they conserve soil with their roots, they are home to half of the world's genetic library, they store carbon, they control our climate.

And for 2 billion people, they are this amazing spiritual heritage.

So thanks to WHOLE forest research, thanks to climbing trees, we now understand how important trees are for the actual backbone of our survival in the finances of almost every business on the planet.

So what's the challenge?

Oh my gosh, in my lifetime, half of the world's trees have disappeared and that's not a very good track record for scientists, for politicians, or for citizens.

So we have to really figure something out and do it really quickly.

This is not about just maybe, you know, digging up dinosaur bonds, which will last for thousands more years, or cleaning off paintings, or manuscripts, which could live in environmental controlled libraries for another 200 years.

We need to save our forest in the next five or 10 years, or we human beings are toast, literally and figuratively.

So I've started a new project in my dotage, hopefully it'll succeed before I go into the soil, myself, it's called Mission Green, which hopefully will save the world's 10 most endangered forests through programs that hire indigenous women and families, that bring students in to study the biodiversity, and that through a sustainable income from ecotourism, by building canopy walkways, we can reverse the deforestation that's going on in many of these endangered forests.

My partner in crime, is a wonderful brilliant biologist at Harvard named Ed Wilson, who wrote a fabulous book called "Half-Earth."

He's written about, of course, 40 or 50 books in his long career.

But in this book, "Half-Earth" he proposes, we should save half the planet for 99% of biodiversity and the other half can be left for that one species called humankind.

And in this book he does define the 10 or 15 most endangered forests, and so my new foundation, Mission Green, uses that list based upon incredible scientific acumen to try hard to save these forests in the next 10 years.

How will we do that?

Well, we're using a model from another really good friend of mine named Sylvia Earle, who started a program 10 years ago to save the most endangered spots in the ocean, mostly coral reefs and fisheries.

And she started a program called Mission Blue to bring attention to those ocean hotspots, or Hope Spots as Sylvia calls them in order to save them.

So with that in mind, I'm using Mission Green to partner with Sylvia, and save those important hopespots in the forest.

We have a great conservation model, thanks to Sylvia.

We have a great team of world-class experts, and most importantly, we have a lot of local leadership on the ground from people like me and others who have been in these forests for decades, so that we have to develop the trust with people that live there.

And that's really one of the most important success components of conservation.

If you don't have trust and faith and friendship with local people, it's not really going to happen.

So with that, our first six walkways include: subtropical Florida, Amazonian Peru, Mozambique, Madagascar, India and Bhutan.

So stay tuned while we try very hard to make this happen.

And I wanna just illustrate with a case study that's in the book, how important it is to save these forests and how incredible it is to see so much deforestation around the world.

So I'm taking you quickly and my little magic wand to Ethiopia where the last remaining forests are in a churchyard, and you can probably see here very barely this round device, which is the Ethiopian or Ethiopian Coptic church, or the religious center of all of the surrounding area.

But the only trees are there because the priests are the stewards of all of God's creatures.

And for me as a biologist, I am the steward of biodiversity.

So we have created a partnership it's quite incredible, maybe one of the first times where being a woman was a more trustworthy vision for this church leader than being a male scientist.

And together we're working hard where I am the global voice, the fundraiser, and the producer of the technology.

And my fellow priests are the ones on the ground that get the trust and the activity of the local people to succeed in saving these trees.

So our solution is simple, we educate the priests, we educate the local school kids, and we take all the stones out of the farmer's fields, which they love, and we built fabulous conservation walls around the church forest to keep the cattle from coming in and eating all the trees and keep all of the farmers from plowing a little bit too close to the boundaries.

So today, if you go to Ethiopia, hopefully you'll see this kind of vision, this gorgeous wall behind it, the fabulous genetic library of the country of Ethiopia.

And these are the kinds of things that we're trying to do around the world with local leadership, with the opportunity, hopefully of engaging and hiring women and families in our canopy walkway opportunities, in our stonewalls in Ethiopia, in this case, whatever it takes to be sensitive to the local needs and try to help them save their forests and yet provide an income at the same time.

So we're working really hard, in the next five years I hope you'll see a walkway in Madagascar, I hope you'll see us finish the walkway with its education programs in the Amazon, and maybe even start a new walkway in India, which would be very, very exciting.

But of course we can only do that with help from philanthropists and sponsors.

So we're really trying very hard to find those people.

I wished I had a connection to Amazon, 'cause think about it, the name Amazon is a very successful business, but it's also the biggest, fabulous research and education, and biodiversity and conservation site in the whole world.

So maybe we can get the help of some of these bigger corporations to work with us and save these important forests.

So with that, I'm going to close in a minute.

I just wanna end with this quote, because I think we are really at an emergency stage to save our forests and I hope all of you might read the "Arbornaut" and hear about how we can save forests, hear about what the importance of forests really are, and maybe share a few of my stories at the same time.

So with that, there is a crazy and wonderful video that I wanna share with you.

I did sponsor a rapper because during COVID, all of the artists of the world were so, so starved for support.

And so I joined a group that sponsored artists in New York city, and my absolute most favorite rapper "Hila the Killa" has made a special rap about forest conservation and being an Arbornaut.

So I'm going to turn it over to the team back, I hope on the ground, who can therefore share this rap with you.

Is that possible Nancy?

(hip hop music begins) - Hi.

- Hi.

- [Girl] How'd you get up there?

- I climbed.

- I wanna try.

♪ Hi, I'm Arbornaut ♪ I wander the tree tops, how could I not ♪ ♪ It's a magical world full of biodiversity.

♪ ♪ 50% of all species live in these canopies ♪ ♪ Creators of oxygen so imagine the air ♪ ♪ When you're climbing the tree and get way up there ♪ ♪ Trees holds onto the soil ♪ They recycle with care, ♪ Home for birds, snakes, ants, bugs even water bears ♪ ♪ With so much life you can't top the prominence ♪ ♪ The tops of the trees are like an Eighth Continent ♪ ♪ From the tropical rain forest to the temperate woods ♪ ♪ To the tree-lined city streets ♪ ♪ Of my Brooklyn neighborhood ♪ Go to the top you don't even need any legs ♪ ♪ Roll through climb trees with Canopy Meg!

♪ ♪ If the tree is a human, then the crown is it's head ♪ ♪ Don't cut down the tree, love and climb them instead ♪ ♪ I'm climbing the tree tops ♪ Goin off the top no stop ♪ Tryin to live off the tree crops ♪ ♪ Stop the chop before we drop, I mean ♪ ♪ I'm climbing the tree tops ♪ Goin off the top no stop ♪ Tryin to live off the tree crops ♪ ♪ Stop the chop before we drop ♪ You went to the moon, you're an astronaut ♪ ♪ I'm on top of the woods, I'm an arbornaut ♪ ♪ Honoring the life we ought to not take for granted ♪ ♪ We're related to these trees, we are their grandkids ♪ ♪ Go back to the roots study indigenous knowledge ♪ ♪ We've been studying trees since before there was college ♪ ♪ They give us fruit and nuts for free ♪ ♪ No vendor, some are older than 1,000 years ♪ ♪ Trees are elders ♪ They provide and they shelter ♪ ♪ Tap into their splendor ♪ Protect and endeavor to love them forever ♪ ♪ Never sever your connection to your roots ♪ ♪ Climb trees, no truth, and pass it to the youth ♪ ♪ I'm climbing the tree tops ♪ Going off the top no stop ♪ Tryin to live off the tree crops ♪ ♪ Stop the chop before we drop ♪ I'm climbing the tree tops ♪ Goin off the top no stop ♪ Tryin to live off the tree crops ♪ ♪ Stop the chop before we drop ♪ Be an arbornaut, be an arbornaut ♪ ♪ Be an arbornaut, be an arbornaut ♪ ♪ Be an arbornaut, climb trees, climb trees, climb trees ♪ ♪ Be with the trees, be with the trees ♪ (hip hop music ends) - That was super (indistinct) - Fantastic, isn't she great, oh my gosh, thanks Nancy for letting me share an artist as well as Science.

- I love that, that was wonderful.

Megs we've got some questions for you.

You talked about women not being welcome in STEM, and that is a common thread that we've heard across the many different disciplines that make up STEM.

How did you navigate this challenge?

How did you use, I guess, being a woman to your advantage when you could?

- Well, first of all, I was really naive.

So I have to say, I hope my book will educate other women, and I also hope it will educate men 'cause I'm the mother of two wonderful boys, and I think both genders need to think harder about inclusivity and Science.

So it wasn't easy for a lot of times, especially in field biology, which was considered a male dominant career for the most part.

One or two amazing things happened to me, one was when I went to many remote jungles and places like that, most of the chiefs and the people in charge respected and trusted me better.

I would have my little picture album of my children and it brought a level of trust that wasn't always the same with some of my male colleagues.

So being a woman in certain cases was really advantageous, which is kinda good.

And the second thing I realized as I look back on my career, even though it was tough, juggling family and career, my boys kept me grounded.

They always gave me much better sense of wonder 'cause they loved the bugs I brought home, or they were so happy to go into the forest to look for leaves.

So I think seeing Science through the eyes of kids is a really powerful tool and I'm grateful that I had that opportunity to be a parent.

And even though it might have cut back on my professional advancements in many ways, it was also really good for my soul.

- Yes, kids give a great perspective, which is really helpful because that's sometimes it's things that you would have never looked at a certain way from a different angle.

- Totally.

- Thank you, okay, have a question from Victor.

"What was the most mind blowing discovery when you reached the tree tops?"

- Cool, great question, Victor.

Well, first of all, I was scared to death in my first climb.

I had welded a Slingshot out of a piece of metal and soda harness from some seatbelt webbing at the university of Sydney, where I was a very poor graduate student.

And so I was praying and hoping that nothing would break and everything worked.

But when I got up there for the first time, it was this riot is amazing world of so many species, everything's up there, the fruits, the flowers, the leaves getting eaten by the bugs and the birds eating the bugs and et cetera, et cetera, this amazing complex ecosystem.

So I guess one of the best and most amazing discoveries was realizing that the top of the tree is where the action is.

And that's where most of that 50% of biodiversity on the land part of our planet inhabits.

And guess what, we never knew that from foresters for over 100 years, who walked on the forest floor.

We only knew that when a couple of Arbornauts climbed a tree and looked around, and started counting everything.

So that was a pretty fabulous discovery, and it means that's a very precious area.

We have to save whole forests, We have to save different kinds of forests because they all contain different genetic libraries, meaning many, many different species.

- Yes, I'm sure, I bet that's a big challenge, especially looking at fragmentation and how that disrupts, how some ecosystems work.

Can you talk a little bit about forest fragmentation and how that does impact the critters that live there?

- Absolutely, and now of course, most of our forests are fragmented, which is heartbreaking in so many ways.

Many species have the obvious outcome, things like Jaguars need many, many kilometers of space to make a living and survive.

And when we fragment for us, some of those higher predators and bigger organisms disappear right away.

But equally important is when we fragment forest.

Some of the lesser things and smaller things disappear as well.

Every orchid needs a different pollinator and many tree species have specific insects that feed on them.

And as we cut back on forest and bifurcate different little spots and end up with just tiny patches, we don't have a whole lot to go on and we even changed the climate.

So some of them dry out and don't have the level of shade for survival.

So we really are doing a terrible thing.

The other problem we face is in places like Ethiopia, or countries that have been so deforested, they only do have tiny fragments left and people say to me, "Well, that's disgusting shame on them because they should be fixing that, they should connect all their fragments.

But if your children are starving, you need to farm, and if you don't have any advanced agriculture, if you're living with sustainable, I mean, very primitive agriculture, you have to have to farm larger areas.

So we need to work between agriculture and forest conservation in order to allow for some of these countries to expand these little fragments or connect them and make bigger areas, which will be better for some of the organisms, and certainly for the genetic biodiversity that we so badly need on this planet.

- Yeah, absolutely, I wanna jump in quickly to the method that you use to climb these tall trees 'cause these trees are incredibly tall.

So can you talk a little bit about how tall they are, and how you develop that method for climbing trees?

- Sure, and I was again so naive.

I grew up in Upstate New York and all the leaves fall off the trees every winter, even though it's really beautiful orange, yellow, red.

When I first went to the tropics as a graduate student at the university of Sydney, because I got a scholarship, I couldn't believe that the rain forest stayed green all year around.

And my advisor said, "Well, if you're interested in studying leaves," which I was, "You're going to have to get up to the top of the tree," which horrified me.

I thought maybe I go to hire and train a monkey, maybe I could use binoculars, anything but actually having to go up there myself.

But it finally became the fact that I didn't need to go up there myself, and so that was when I welded the Slingshot, as I mentioned earlier, and soda harnessed, and borrowed some ropes from the caving club at Sydney, but it became apparent pretty quickly that was a solo effort.

Only one person can climb one rope at one point in time.

And when I was aware of all the millions of insects in the canopy and my need to find them and figure out what was eating all the leaves.

The canopy walkway was my second gadget of design and that was much more safe and inclusive to allow multiple people to be up there in a less threatening way, and that was super fun.

Again, we have the construction cranes, we have the inflatables, and today of course, we have drones and satellite images.

So we do have this chronology of new technologies for Arbornauts, which is fabulous, but the original ones are still really important.

People still need to climb trees to actually get up close and personal with things like which bug is eating, which leave, or which pollinator is pollinating which orchid.

So there is still that need for the simpler technologies.

- It's really impressive to watch people go up and down these trees in exactly what you're talking about to do research.

You did mention drones are they helpful, or do they distract with the wildlife and scare things away?

- Mostly helpful, to be honest.

Because if we use drones properly, we fly them high above the canopy, they're fabulous for mapping flowering trees.

Sometimes in this huge sea of broccoli, as I call it, you have these hundreds and hundreds of different species, but yet one species might be flowering purple in August and you can fly a drone up and you can actually count those trees.

In Indonesia, they use drones to count the orangutan nests and other kinds of things, which is really fantastic because it saves hundreds of hours of climbing individual trees.

So that's fantastic.

In very rare occasions, the noise could be off-putting to certain wildlife that's very shy.

Mostly it's not such a problem, I mean, to be honest, look at our highways, look at our roads, look at our electricity and our air conditioning, in our developed countries, we have so, so many noises and we still uphold the fact that we think our wildlife is healthy.

So one drone in the middle of the Amazon, isn't gonna make any negative difference at all.

And the other cool thing we've discovered is working with indigenous people in villages, the kids love the drones, they love to learn a little bit about the new technology.

So in some ways they're an important tool to create relationships, which is not a bad thing.

- Oh, that's, that's a great twist to that.

I really liked that.

It's kind of education on both sides.

- Yeah, exactly.

- A couple of questions of people wondering what was the coolest creature that you encountered in the tree tops?

- Oh my gosh, that's such a hard question.

I might have to cheat and list a couple, but you know, of course I love things that eat leaves because my whole world was studying leaves and how they lived and what killed them, which was usually things eating them.

So I was just fascinated by all the critters that ate leaves, so that meant I had to love sloths in the Amazon, and I had the love koalas in Australia because those are these extraordinary furry animals that actually consume hundreds, if not thousands of leaves a day, which is pretty damn cool.

But if you move to the other end of the spectrum with teensy things, I became very enamored with water bears, these little teeny extremophile organisms.

There's a whole chapter of the book where I led a project with kids in wheelchairs.

Because as I guess, a disadvantaged person myself always fighting the hurdle of being a female.

I was very invested in working with different diverse groups of students; Latino, African-American girls, whatever.

And last but not least, mobility limited students, are almost always told, "Oh, you must stay inside, you have to be in the lab, you can't come outdoors because it's too dangerous for you.

So I had this fabulous project taking mobility limited kids and teaching them to climb trees and to make it worth their while, I partnered with a biologist who studies water bears, these teensy weensy, cool things, look them up, Google them tonight.

They have their own phylum called Tardigrades, which is a very cool thing to think about.

And we did that because then the students could find new species, and over the course of five summers, we trained lots of students in wheelchairs and we found lots of new water bears, even in Oak trees in Kansas and Elm and maple trees in Massachusetts.

So water bears are everywhere.

I will vouch for the fact that probably the communist thing in your backyard, if you wanna really know the truth, so maybe check them out.

- Well, now I'm intrigued to go out and look for the water bears that sounds amazing.

So yeah, we have many more questions.

"You mentioned how many species are found in the tree tops, but how many are only found in tree tops?"

That's the only place that they are found.

- Almost all of those of that 50% of what we believe in the terrestrial world lives in the tree tops, most of them are pretty exclusive, so for example, almost every bird is never found on the forest floor and almost no insects that live in the canopy, and pollinate, and eat leaves, ever goes down to the forest floor.

So I would very safely say 99% of those species are never in the understory or on the forest floor.

So guess what, you have to go up to find all these cool things and see all these stunningly gorgeous and beautiful, absolutely fabulous creatures in biodiversity.

- Meg, "what is the greatest threat to forests and what can we do about it?"

- Oh gosh, this is such a hard question, but such an important question, so thanks for asking Jim.

Of course, humans are the greatest threat to forests, it's so disappointing.

Do you know Nancy, that America cut down 97% of her forests over the years?

I mean, we are not innocence in terms of deforestation.

We cut down our primary forests, meaning we probably don't really even know what lived in the original canopies of American forest.

Because all that we see around us is regrowth, even though it looks great and we love it, we don't really know what we might've lost centuries ago, so that's pretty difficult.

And now of course the greatest threat still is the loss of forest through a number of human causes, which include fire, and clearing for agriculture, and clearing for timber, and clearing for urbanization.

So we have these crazy things.

And last but not least climate change, which is causing droughts in extreme temperatures, which causes a lot of trees to die back.

So we have a lot of threats to our forest and a lot of challenges.

And one of the important things I beg of everybody, I'm praying right now is, you need to save big trees.

You probably saw the fires in Australia last year where absolute thousands of acres were destroyed by wildfires due to climate change and the hot dry conditions.

But it's great to plant trees and lots of people gave money to plant trees, but seedlings are not gonna support all those koala bears that are being resuscitated in different places to come back into the wild and you know, seedlings are not gonna support all of those millions of beetles that live in the canopies of Australian forest.

We need to save big trees at all costs, and somehow, especially in America, we think it's okay to cut trees down on the side of the road or to cut trees down on our property if we think they're interfering with our septic system or we wanna build a new garage and there's a tree in the way.

So I think we really, really need to look hard at them as the absolute gold.

The best inheritance our kids could ever have is a big tree and not just little itty-bitty saplings.

- Like as you mentioned, they really are, the lifeline of the earth.

Meg, "In terms of deforestation, what region of the earth is most endangered today?"

- Wow, yeah, you know, I'm afraid to tell you, but a lot of it is the developing countries because of their economy, they sell their timber and the culprits in this are the developed countries, meaning North America, and Europe, and Japan, and Australia, because we buy products probably without knowing it in many cases that are the result, or the product of deforestation.

We buy soy, we buy Palm oil, we buy oranges, we buy beef, we buy all sorts of things and we never ask where they came from.

And until we start asking the origin, we are the ones responsible for deforesting, these places, which includes of course, a lot of African countries, a lot of south East Asian countries, a lot of places that don't probably have the economy to do otherwise.

Brazil is a really disappointing example of a country that has a fairly good economy, but the temptation to sell products like beef and soy to American markets has really caused them to be tempted, to cut down their forests.

So it has to be a combination of not just the countries of origin of the deforestation, but most important the countries where the consumerism is going on to probably change global policy.

- So being a well-formed consumer can also be something that we can all be aware of to make a change.

- Totally, absolutely.

- Darryl would like to know, "Have you ever been attacked by animals while doing research in the trees?"

- All the time, but yet I always laugh and I tell kids when I do school talks, which I do every single week, "I'm more scared to walk in New York city in the dark than I am in the jungle.

I've certainly given probably gallons of blood to leeches in Australia, in Asia, because this is this very innocuous kind of worm-like thing that does suck your blood.

It crawls up through your boots and it's pretty nasty.

It doesn't exist as much in the Amazon, which is thankful, but they're there and of course I've been bitten by ants and fortunately never bitten by venomous snakes and never attacked by any kind of large predatory animal, like a Jaguar or something else, 'cause they're probably more frightened of me than I am of them.

But to be honest, I always view humans as the biggest enemy in the rainforest.

I used to be as a student in Australia, camping by myself a lot.

And I was really scared if people came out of the pub a little bit drunk and maybe they would be not so nice if they came across me, camping in the forest or something, but I was a lot less scared of anything else.

So mostly the animals run away from us, you do have to have your wits about you because there are things that we are not used to, and our bodies can't tolerate.

One has to have long sleeves to prevent from mosquitoes, biting you in malaria ridden countries, et cetera, et cetera, but hey, now you've got to be careful on Cape Cod that you don't get Lyme disease from a tick.

So we all have our issues to deal with in the tropics.

I don't think is any worse than anywhere else, but you do need to know enough about the enemies and you need to hopefully be with a guide, or travel with someone like me that can help you be informed (laughs).

- Do you carry antivenom with you?

- I do not, to be honest.

I have worked on several projects with herpetologists, which are people that are snake experts.

One in particular was with sea snakes, reputably the most venomous in the world.

And part of the reason for that is, you have to be a pretty good expert to deal with the antivenom, and you also have to keep it many times in cold conditions or special conditions, which doesn't really synchronize with some of the primitive conditions where we're working in the jungle.

So the most important antivenom is taking a stick, or walking hard on the ground so that those snakes are way far away before you even come close to stepping on them.

- How about bullet ants, how do you get them out of the way?

- Oh gosh, you don't, I tell people, "Shake your boot before you put it out in the morning."

The great thing about bullet ants is they're solitary.

There's not a hundred at once, there's only one, and they're so big that you can usually see them.

And the other thing is on a canopy walkway, a lot of times you're holding onto a railing and you wanna just keep an eye on what's crawling on the railing because bullet ants do love to crawl on those walkway railings.

- I know someone who did that exact thing, was walking on the crosswalk and grabbed ahold of the bullet with her hand (laughs).

- Oh gosh, sorry about that (laughs).

- Dr. Lowman, have you experienced where scientists quarrel over trees to research.

For example, overlapping research on specific trees in areas across the world?

- Yes and no, I will say that I've been fortunate to collaborate with good people for most of my work, but two things that I've observed that are a little disappointing; one is the, you know, in the world of Science, we are promoted by publishing papers and creating data sets, which most scientists wanna keep very secret so they can publish them and then they can get promoted.

That means there's a little bit less incentive to share until later, and sometimes in the case of a rainforest waiting so long is very detrimental to the health of the forest.

And the other thing is publishing a paper in a scientific journal is fabulous and very prestigious in our world, but it's not really saving the forest in any way, shape, or form, in most cases, the information probably doesn't even reach the local people that live in the forest.

So somewhere somehow I think we need to change the model of how Science gets rewarded.

If a few brave college presidents, or provosts would be willing to say, "You know what, I'm gonna promote all of the scientists that have saved 1,000 acres of forest, or have reversed the extinction of a species?

Those would be fabulous goals to set for scientists, but I'm afraid that most of the universities have these very conservative policies of how they promote and reward their staff.

So I'm a little bit sad about that because I think it's holding back the action plans that we need to say forests.

- Yeah, I definitely would agree with you there, because it takes years and years for this research to be gathered before it's even started to be analyzed, to be share out.

- Exactly, yeah.

- Meg, you talked about the crosswalks that were in Sarasota.

Can you tell us the name of that, so if anybody listening tonight wants to visit, they can do sometimes.

- I'd love to, I was just out there today at sunrise, it was so beautiful.

Myakka River State Park, and this was the first public canopy walkway in North America.

By public, I mean, anybody can go to it.

You pay your $5 to get into the State Park and you can go on that walkway day and night and enjoy it forever and ever, which is so great.

We built that in the year 2000, it was a fundraising by the local community, which was fantastic when some of the local groups and the mayor said, "Oh my gosh, Meg has built walkways around the world, we need one in Florida."

So we fundraised here and built that walkway.

And it's modest because Florida forests are not very tall, it's 35 feet tall, but it has a tower that goes almost 100 feet.

So you can see this fabulous view over the whole State Park and this fabulous, I call it the field of broccoli, that's how a forest looks when you're above it looking down.

And it of course has live Oaks and Palm trees and things that are very characteristic of subtropical forest.

But it's about 10 minutes from Downtown Sarasota, and the State Park is always open, and it's a really great destination.

There are a couple others Nancy, Holden Arboretum in Ohio has a great one, Witchy Vermont just has a fantastic walkway that we just built for them, there are a couple in Massachusetts.

We're really hopeful and watching a new one that just opened in the Redwoods out in Sequoia zoo in Eureka, California.

So just North America is discovering her tree tops, a little slowly, but it's fantastic to see this kind of expansion of this new exploration.

- Yeah, that's really fantastic, and I really love and appreciate how you bring the community together, to put this within the community.

So you have the community raising money, I mean working with them to appreciate those tree tops that they are going up into.

- Absolutely, yeah.

- So we have a couple more questions left.

Can you give an inspiring example of reforestation, where is that happening and who is doing it?

- Sure, and I'm gonna say one sobering thing, first I was part of...

I was the second generation of over 50 year project to look at rainforest seedlings and how they grow.

And this was in Australia and over my tenure working with an 80-year-old biologist, a brilliant guy named Joe Connell from the University of California in Santa Barbara.

We had seedlings about this high three inches that were 60 years old.

Meaning that the ability for these seedlings to reinforce quickly is not the case.

In other words, rainforests do not grow back quickly and many, many species need thousands of years probably to become canopy trees because they have to grow up in the shade to be successful and the conditions have to be just right.

So it is pretty disappointing, overall.

The second problem is in a lot of countries, forestry departments and governments who don't know enough Science are naively planting non-native species.

It's a big problem in Ethiopia, it's a problem even in some countries in South America where they want to come and plant Eucalypts, which are native to Australia.

Why, because eucalypts grow really fast and eucalypts grow faster in countries outside of Australia where their native pests don't exist, but they don't support any local wildlife or biodiversity, and in most cases they need about four times more water than all the native trees in Ethiopia, for example, so that's a really disastrous situation.

There are countries that are working really hard to replant.

Costa Rica has some great examples because a lot of Costa Rica was deforested.

Many of the central American countries have enough funding coming from the US to pilot and pioneer reafforestation, which is great, but again, when you cut down a rainforest; how do you get back all those orchids in the canopy, how do you get back the bees that pollinate the orchids, how do you get back the water bears that used to live on the leaf surfaces?

So we think we're reafforesting, but we might just be creating the skeleton forest that's missing a lot of the biodiversity, and that's heartbreaking, so I go back to my initial note, save the big trees if you can, and try not to depend on reafforestation if you can possibly afford it.

- Absolutely, because even though those trees are there so much more is missing as you pointed out.

- Yeah, yeah.

- Jim Weiss has a question about invasive species, "So what can we do about pests like the Emerald Ash borer that's attacking the Ash trees, and the woolly adelgid that's attacking all the hemlocks, especially in the Northeast part of North America."

- So every tree, unfortunately in north America now seems to have a pest, and of course, most of that happened because human beings have transported them around the world as our lives became more mobile, we brought things in, we took things out, so it's a disaster, it's a chaos, to be honest, and we are in big trouble.

It's a very expensive process to protect trees, or to try to hybridize certain species to make their genetic makeup a little bit stronger.

I don't have an answer, Jim, I'm really sorry that, it's a hugely expensive process.

We're looking at some crazy ethical situations.

Should we transport trees up north because it's too hot in the south for them to grow.

Should we start to invest millions of dollars to save organisms that are becoming extinct because their habitat is too dry, or too hot, or too whatever because of climate change.

So you're gonna be seeing a lot of difficult situations and invasive such as kind of the tip of the iceberg in a way it's not easy, it's not good at the end of the day, do we have to accept a planet where the strongest species survive, which might be cockroaches, and pigeons, and maybe a few crazy species of rugged trees.

It's a really difficult problem for biologists as well as policy makers, as well as landowners.

And gosh, I just really hope we'll get some clarity as the next decades unfold because right now, I think, it's an understated problem in most governments.

- Yeah, absolutely, and there needs to be a lot more working together around the early stages of those, those times where they get out of hand.

You've had so many inspiring words for us tonight.

If someone wanted to follow in your footsteps and do fieldwork, what kind of degrees would they need to do that?

- Well, first of all, I hope they will, I hope everyone out there has a daughter or a friend and they might buy my book and they could read it and want to grow up and take my place, because I need a good succession plan, and I think that's really important.

I did a Biology degree, and an Ecology degree, and a Botany degree, I think looking back, I wished I'd focused more on languages.

I think it's fantastic always to speak the language of the people where you work.

So the more you have that opportunity, I wished I'd done more economics so that I could have better understood the financial value of a tree long ago in my career, I understand it now, but if I had known it earlier, that probably would have helped me become a more stalwart conservationists and have a bigger voice for trees.

The good news is you probably don't even need to be a scientist to protect trees.

Maybe you can be a leader, a corporate leader would be fabulous.

How many corporations own a canopy walkway or fund one?

Wouldn't that be a cool thing in their annual report?

Wouldn't it be fabulous for all their workers to come and visit it?

So I just hope that diverse audiences might take up the responsibility for trees, not just scientists.

- Well, Meg, I really liked that angle (laughs), that's fantastic because that's very true.

And the more people we can have involved and in part of that process, the greater success, right?

- Absolutely true.

- What hope can you offer young people?

- I tried in my book to make hope one of the features, because I think it's really crazy to talk to kids all the time, which I do and not offer hope.

I think it's really, really important.

And I list about 10 things you can do to save trees, I won't say them all, 'cause I hope you might buy the book and help me support conservation with book sales.

But you know, biggest invest is my new project, Mission green, I hope you'll go online to my foundation, treefoundation.org and look it up, and find out what we're doing.

But even in your local community, you can be a better consumer, demand your grocery stores tell you where the beef came from, where the soy came from, where the coffee beans came from, and study whether or not they're sustainable industries in the right places, and they're not responsible for deforestation.

Heaven forbid if you wear makeup or buy plastic, the Palm oil from Indonesia is being used in those products, and you need to ask people, "Where does this come from?"

Secondly, you can educate kids, you can take kids to nature, so they'll grow up and be good stewards, and third, you can give to your favorite conservation organizations, and maybe more importantly, pay for an ecotourism vacation.

Take your children to a walkway in the Amazon, or even here in Florida instead of Disney World, heaven forbid, because you need to focus on supporting these ecotourism endeavors that help the local people save their forests.

So I'll stop right there, 'cause obviously I have a lot of ideas, but they're all in the book and I hope you'll enjoy it.

- And we're gonna have a link to that book in just a moment in the chat.

We're gonna close out with the final question tonight, Meg, what would be the ultimate outcome that you could see in your career?

- So before I go into the soil and have earthworms decompose me, I hope that I can use my new platform called Mission Green to build canopy walkways in the 10 most endangered forests of the world, which I know; where they are and what they are, because I'm a scientist and I have the access to that good detailed information.

And then, if those walkway sites, I wanna train women and indigenous families to run them, so they get an income and then I'd like to fund students from universities around the world to discover the biodiversity.

So my dream is to basically use my knowledge to save those genetic libraries and not a lot, but just the most important ones, because I think that's the machinery for the future of our planet.

- Well, you still have a lot of work to do ahead of your Meg (laughs).

- I think you're right, oh my gosh (laughs).

- Thank you, Meg is the co-founder and Executive Director of Tree Foundation and more recently launched Mission Green in 2021.

Her memoir, "The Arbornaut: A Life Discovering the Eighth Continent in the Trees Above us" was released in 2021.

And we're gonna have a link in the chat, so you can find that book.

Our next "Science Pub" is on Wednesday, October 13th, we'll have guest speaker Mark Lenzenweger who will address The Nature of Personality Disorder: Understanding Narcissistic, Borderline, and Psychopathic Personality Disorders.

The link to sign up for that "Science Pub" is in the chat.

So please RSVP for that today to reserve your virtual seat to Science.

You can also watch past "Science Pubs", through the WSKG app on-demand on your smart devices and on the WSKG website.

Be sure to like our Facebook page for future events, and states and Science updates.

I wanna thank Dr. Meg Lowman, thank you so much.

It has been an absolute pleasure this evening to talk with you and listen to your expertise, and so many wonderful and inspiring things that you had to say.

- Oh Nancy, thank you, such a privilege to be here.

I really appreciate it.

- Thank you so much.

I'd also like to thank the co-founder of "Science Pub", Kristine Kieswer, she was filling your questions tonight.

Julia Diana, our Science intern, she was live tweeting over on Twitter, and so you could follow that conversation happening there.

I'd like to thank Alyssa Micha and Andy Pioch, our director and producers this evening.

And I'd like to thank you for attending tonight's "Sience Pub".

I'm your host Nancy Cottington, thank you and have a good night.

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