In the Field: Counting Trees in the Amazon Jungle

Jeff Chambers' path to the Amazon forest started 20 years ago in an unlikely place: Livermore, California. Since then, he has bushwhacked through dense woodland, traveled hundreds of miles down jungle rivers, had close encounters with the world's most painful ant and near misses with deadly snakes-all in the name of science. Chambers studies trees-dead and alive. Or rather, more scientifically, he studies the ecology and carbon cycling in forested ecosystems and has become an expert in tree mortality, which can have a major impact on the global carbon cycle. "For every ton of CO₂ we emit to the atmosphere, only half stays in the atmosphere. The other half goes in the ocean and in the land for some unknown period of time," he says. "Some scientists estimate that more than half of this terrestrial sink is in old-growth tropical forests, so it's very important to understand exactly what role these forests are playing in carbon sequestration." Chambers, a scientist in Berkeley Lab's Earth Sciences Division, grew up in Santa Cruz and earned a Ph.D.