ahoi crew 🙂 ⛵ the February release makes the assessment of biodiversity richness 🐛🦚🦉🦗🍄 a great tree watching experience.
Learn why trees are also called motherships of (land) biodiversity and why sick or damaged trees 🌳🌲🌴are worth being protected: https://youtu.be/XqmbXZENj2E
00:40 Quiz 03:00 Overview – what’s new? 05:50 Biodiversity richness 23:35 Learning Paths 30:36 Group chats 41:10 Q&A 50:20 Quiz answer
Fair winds until Mar 19th, when we see us again.
A few words on the visualization of ecosystem services.
Back in 2022, when we had established a basic organizational structure for the ARK, the playful visualization of “green capital” moved to the center of our project. Gamified science communication, so we figured, is the key for broader understanding of our dependence on other life forms and a transformation from an anthropocentric to an ecocentric worldview.
At the beginning there was a 1986 FIFA Worldcup album, which I somehow kept over the years as a memory of how childhood activities which have been sanctioned by the adult world, put us on tracks to a distorted view of our role on the planet. And there was the question of how to turn trees into heroes like Argentina’s soccer team. What kind of superpowers could we assign to trees that would turn them into desirable collector items?
Then there were first sketches and a concept which we sent to a few established tree ecologists at TU Munich whose scientific articles we had studied. Was it actually possible to break hard science down into something that an average person could understand? Our job was gamified science communication for which we had to understand the science, so we met in December 2022 with Prof. Rötzer and Prof. Pauleit at the TU Munich campus in Freising.
While we received usable formulas for tree age, carbon absorption and cooling power, we were left with the study of more papers in regard to biodiversity richness. Its important to emphasize that biodiversity richness is central to the concept of trees being a keystone species. German star forester Peter Wohlleben calls trees “motherships of biodiversity” and he has a point, considering that few other organisms can call hundreds of species dependent or associated.
Well, to make a long story short, we were stuck with very unsatisfying estimations of biodiversity richness, until a Swiss-Philippino volunteer had last fall an idea and came up with a plan on how to integrate a pedagogically meaningful way to assess biodiversity richness of trees. Thanks to Gloria’s ground work, Sonia’s eye for UX/UI design and Lukas’ tech lead, the functionality is online and will certainly do a fine job in educating the next generation of BFG guardians.