Paramotor Magazine
Issue 16, December 2009 / January 2010
Mark Olson studies tree tops in Mexico by paramotor – the results have made science sit up and take note. By Ed Ewing
“So much of the world is disappearing so quickly,” says Mark Olson, a 40-year-old professor of biology at Mexico City University. “And it’s becoming more and more urgent.”
Mark’s speciality is evolutionary biology. Specifically, he’s interested in trees and ‘tree crowns’, the tops of trees. To get there he uses a paramotor, flying 100 m above remnants of tropical rain forest (as opposed to tropical rain forest) in Mexico.
He flies over slowly, taking digital photos of his ‘specimen’ trees. He then goes back to the tree on the ground and climbs up, using a crossbow to shoot ropes over the high branches, before measuring all the different elements of the tree: trunk, branches, leaf size and crown area.
His findings, of what he describes as an “exploratory” study that measured 500 samples from 13 species, have pushed forward understanding, and made other biologists take note...
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