Her Panama plots show fruit-eating animals plant most tropical trees, a cheaper path than monocrop carbon credits.
Forest ecologist Daisy Dent of ETH Zurich maps a century of regrowth across plots in Panama’s Barro Colorado Nature Monument, where no tree was planted by human hands. Her records trace how waves of tree life rise from bare earth and which animals built each patch by dropping seeds in their droppings.
Dent works within an international research network and uses records amassed under the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, which manages the reserve formed when the Panama Canal flooded the area in 1914. Fruit-eating animals such as spider monkeys, bats, and parrots plant more than 70% of trees in tropical forests, while rodents called agoutis dominate some single-species patches.
For operators weighing carbon projects, the data supports a low-cost, high-impact alternative to schemes that plant huge areas with one tree species. Tropical forests hold roughly 40% of carbon stored on land, and Dent’s evidence suggests resilient forests can rebound naturally within decades, which changes how teams should model cost, risk, and monitoring.
Dent’s data helps write a playbook for when to let ecosystems regenerate and when to intervene, and she argues that fungi, pollinators, and seed distributors form the network that sustains carbon storage. A 2024 estimate in Nature found that roughly 215 million hectares of forest worldwide, an area larger than Mexico, could regenerate naturally.
What matters
- ETH Zurich ecologist Daisy Dent tracks a century of plots at Panama’s Barro Colorado reserve.
- Monocrop carbon-credit planting can cost more than letting native animals rebuild a forest.
- A 2024 Nature estimate finds 215 million hectares worldwide could regenerate without planting.
Why it matters
A 2024 Nature estimate finds 215 million hectares worldwide could regenerate without planting.
This GenAI News article was prepared in original wording using reporting and materials published by MIT Technology Review AI. Source reference: https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/10/12/1145745/daisy-dent-ecologist-revealing-invisible-networks-revive-rainforests/.
Drafted by the GenAI News review pipeline.