Doctor Margaret Lowman has a number of titles, including Canopy Meg and Einstein of the tree canopy. She is well known for her original work on forests throughout the world, mostly those in the tropics. I first heard about her work when Paul Kennedy interviewed her on the CBC Ideas program last week. She has written over a hundred scientific papers, as well as three books on her work done over the last three decades. She has also participated in many speaking engagements, including a Ted Talk and her own YouTube video.
Her interest in forests started early when she was growing up in a small town in the eastern U.S., and she spent many hours in a tree house with her best friend next door. She married a farmer in Australia and was raising her two boys as well as working on forest research projects dealing with measuring tree leaf mortality in the mid canopy using climbing ropes. She was instrumental in determining the cause of the widespread mortality of the eucalyptus trees in Australia. Because she was being bypassed by people with much less experience, she moved back to the U.S. with her two boys. One of her major accomplishments was to document that almost 50 per cent of life on earth is estimated to live in tree canopies (mostly in the mid layers), yet this was an unexplored region until about 25 years ago. Much of her work has involved solving the challenge of just getting into the treetops. Over the years she has used hot air balloons with suspended platforms, canopy walkways, cherry pickers and construction cranes. Once up there, she discovered that insects eat four times more leaf material than anticipated. She has been instrumental in designing and establishing many forest canopy walkways throughout the world.
Some of her recent work involves the study of forest biodiversity including the amazing rainforest extremophiles, tardigrades (aka waterbears). She is also working on the Ethiopian Church Forests project.
“If you see a forest in Ethiopia, you know there is very likely to be a church in the middle,” writes Alison Abbott in Nature. “… These small but fertile oases — which number around 35,000 and are dotted across the country — are some of the last remaining scraps of the tall, lush natural forests that once covered Ethiopia, and which, along with their biodiversity, have all but disappeared.”
She has been raising funds to educate the locals and support community initiatives of building stone walls from local materials to protect the remaining native forest fragments.
Because of her experience trying to raise her two sons along with a full-time job working on research projects throughout her professional career, she spends considerable time mentoring younger women so they hopefully will be encouraged and able to compete in an area mostly dominated by men. She describes how she has experienced chapters in her life when juggling parenting and career put her at a disadvantage. Science needs the brains of women and since women are the only half of society that can bear children, our system needs to accommodate that. For example, listing child care in a grant budget would be a way to give women more opportunity.
Jim Hilton is a professional agrologist and forester who has lived and worked in the Cariboo-Chilcotin for the past 40 years. Now retired, Hilton still volunteers his skills with local community forests organizations.