The ecologist revealing the invisible networks that revive rainforests

In a research station in central Panama, you can walk through a century of forest time, watching scrubby plots of adolescent trees give way to cathedral-­like canopies of mature growth. Forest ecologist Daisy Dent, a senior scientist at ETH Zurich, oversees this sequence of plots across the Barro Colorado Nature Monument, some of which date as far back as the 19th century. Not one of the trees she surveys was planted by human hands. She maps, measures, and tracks each trunk that emerges, revealing how waves of tree life rise from bare earth.

Tropical forests like these are our planet’s biggest terrestrial carbon sink, accounting for around 40% of carbon stored on land. As part of an international network of researchers, Dent is deciphering the networks of animal and plant interactions that enable some forests to recover after destruction. The goal is a low-cost, high-impact alternative to typical carbon-­crediting schemes, which plant huge areas with a single species of tree. …