GreenITStrategy.com

In the IT world we sometimes only see the inside of a data room and a page of code.  In this context we might wonder what all the fuss about Environmentally Sustainable IT is.  On one hand we can change the data centre to be more energy efficient, on the other side we can use technology to better understand the environment around us and the potential impacts we could hope to avoid.  The latter is exactly what researchers at Microsoft Research Cambridge have done this month, publishing two papers in the journal Science this month...

"One, entitled Predictive Models of Forest Dynamics, authored by [Drew] Purves and Stephen Pacala, of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University, is an excellent treatment of the state of the art in modeling forest dynamics and its impact on climate prediction. Microsoft Research Cambridge has prepared a video explaining the overview.

The second, Animal Versus Wind Dispersal and the Robustness of Tree Species to Deforestation, examines the response by tree species to the destruction of forests. That paper was based on work conducted at Microsoft Research Cambridge by Daniel Montoya, of the Departamento de Ecología of Spain’s Universidad de Alcalá, under Purves’ supervision, and written with Miguel A. Rodriguez, of the Universidad de Alcalá, and Miguel A. Zavala, of the Centro de Investigación Forestal at Spain’s Institito Nacional de Investigación y Tecnología.This paper, too, is featured in a video."

“By applying various methods in computational data analysis to a large source for forest data,” Montoya says, “we have confirmed that, in Spain at least, plants with animal-dispersed seeds are less vulnerable to habitat loss, because animals provide trees with an intelligent dispersal mechanism, travelling and distributing seeds between areas of remaining forest. In contrast, a wind-dispersal method is more susceptible to habitat loss, as seeds are more likely to fall in inhospitable environments.”

Checkout the full article: http://research.microsoft.com/news/featurestories/publish/ForestModeling.aspx