News and Insights
Forests in Warm Conditions Capture More Methane as Temperatures Rise
While today’s carbon markets see forests primarily as a collection of carbon sticks (trees), Bio4Climate knows that forests are climate regulating ecosystems from the fungi to the canopy. New appreciation for the soil biome comes from research which shows that in certain forests the soil is reacting to warmer temperatures by absorbing more methane!
“When soil absorbs methane, it lowers the amount that reaches the atmosphere, cutting warming pressure in the years ahead. Forest soils rarely get credit for this service, yet their performance can rise or fall with weather.”
“Its a Beaver Blind Date”
In Cornwall, England, two beavers met for the first time as they were released into a newly established habitat, marking the first time beavers have been legally released into an English river system.
Beavers were hunted into extinction in the UK roughly 400 years ago, but their role as a keystone species is too valuable to local ecosystems to go on without. Beavers play a key role in rehydrating ecosystems, contributing to cooling, fire resilience, drought resilience and biodiversity.
The beuracratic process took years and a lot of money- was it worth it? Discover the challenges and rewards and whether this beaver blind date was a success.
Events and Community
Save the Date!
Emergent Intelligence of Trees: How Symbiosis Shapes Living Systems
Free Preview March 11; class begins March 18
Trees are not passive components of ecosystems. They are active system-builders that regulate water, carbon, climate, and biological relationships throughout Earth’s living world.
In this course, Jim Laurie examines the intelligence of trees – how trees sense, respond, and adapt through symbiotic relationships with fungi, microbes, insects, and animals, including humans. Drawing on contemporary ecological science and two companion texts—The Genius of Trees by Harriet Rix and Trees: An Illustrated Celebration by Kelsey Oseid—this course explores how trees drive transpiration and cloud formation, stabilize atmospheric chemistry and carbon sequestration, and generate large-scale cooling through the biotic pump.
Rather than treating intelligence as a uniquely human trait, the course reframes it as an emergent property of living systems, expressed through physiological feedback, cooperation, and adaptive symbiosis. These insights offer a scientific foundation to deepen your understanding of how trees and living ecosystems work—and how protecting and restoring biodiversity in nature can reset the path of humanity towards a livable future.
REGISTRATION OPENS SOON!
If you need financial assistance or are interested in a scholarship, please email courses@bio4climate.org.
Registration Deadline Extended!
Due to increased interest, we’ve extended the registration deadline for How Trees & Forests Shape Our Climate until Tuesday, February 17.
Recordings for all classes are made available weekly, including all previous classes and guest speakers.
through February 17, 2026. Recordings for all classes are made available weekly, including all previous classes and guest speakers.
Join us on March 11 for a free class! If you need financial assistance or are interested in a scholarship, please email courses@bio4climate.org.
Episode 5: Watershed Wide — Putting It All Together
Live Conversation with Bill Zeedyk & Shantini Ramakrishnan
Tuesday, February 17 | 7:30 PM ET (Optional screening at 6:00 PM ET)
As our Thinking Like Water series comes to a close, we turn our attention from individual sites to the watershed as a living system.
This includes a rare, live conversation with two very special guests: the legendary ecological restoration pioneer Bill Zeedyk and conservation scientist Shantini Ramakrishnan. Their combined experience spans decades of hands-on restoration, mentorship, and community-led learning to troubleshoot and restore degraded landscapes and waterways.
In Episode 5, the finale of this five-part series, we explore restoration approaches born from local wisdom. The film zooms in on Bill Zeedyk’s watersheds to witness a river’s rewilding through a town center with Lea Knutson of Hermit’s Peak Watershed Alliance, induced meandering on a wildlife refuge with Craig Sponholtz of Watershed Artisans, and a landscape-scale perspective from Josh Miner at Fort Union Ranch, where Zeedyk’s techniques have been applied across 95,000 acres of canyons, tributaries, rivers, uplands, and roads.
This final episode and live conversation reinforces the series’ core insights: water is not something to control, but to understand; reading the landscape is a key first step to restoring our land and waterways; and where there’s a will, there’s a way to coax a river back to its perennial nature.
Looking for a Weekend Read?
Beck Mordini, Bio4Climate’s executive director shares her recommendation for a book that is special to her both in honor of Valentine’s Day and as a tribute to the passing of our beloved co-founder and longtime Executive Director, Adam Sacks.
Fox and I: An Uncommon Friendship
By Catherine Raven
From the preface:
“I realized that a fox, like a rainbow and every other gift from Nature had an intrinsic value that was quite independent of its longevity. After that, whenever I questioned devoting so much time to an animal whose lifespan barely exceeded the blink of an eye I remembered rainbows.”
It would be a disservice to describe this as a book about nature, it is rather a novel about two creatures from different worlds learning to see and appreciate each other. It is a poetic telling of deep seeing as each clump of sedge becomes a home, a food source, a hindrance to finding food or a cover for not becoming food. It is a gentle and patient tale of what it takes to truly know another, and in that knowing to discover love. And finally a story of how we are changed by our relationships.
This isn’t a book you rush to discover the ending, but rather a book you settle into and carry within you as you step back out into your own natural spaces.
By purchasing this title through the link provided above, you’ll continue to support Bio4Climate. We are an affiliate partner of Bookshop.org and receive a portion of the sales price at no additional cost to you.