UC Santa Cruz Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Scott Winton has been wading through thick, smelly muck in the tropics for almost a decade.
UC Santa Cruz Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Scott Winton has been wading through thick, smelly muck in the tropics for almost a decade. He wouldn’t have it any other way. As a wetland ecologist and biogeochemist, he’s been hard at work investigating an important and mysterious topic: peatlands.
Peatlands are a special type of wetland with enormous potential to either help or hurt global efforts to address climate change. If we want peatlands on our side, we’ll have to protect them. But that’s difficult to do, since we still don’t yet know how many of them exist or where they are.
Winton’s latest research, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters provides the first data-driven map of both newly documented and predicted peatland areas across Colombia’s eastern lowlands. Institutions including ETH Zurich, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, and Stanford University contributed to the research. Winton is lead author, and senior author Alison Hoyt is an Assistant Professor of Earth System Science at Stanford.
Read more at University of California - Santa Cruz
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