My little oak tree is no forest, but it also will provide ecosystem services such as wildlife preservation and carbon sequestration.
This will be a very brief blog post about my MOOC experience. A MOOC is a massive online course. Many universities offer them, and generally, they are free. I took my class through Coursera.
#uwmoocs
I just completed my first MOOC from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The course I took was Forest and Humans, taught by Dr. Catherine Woodward. I found the course to be very interesting and the professor excellent. The videos were high quality and easy to listen to, though they did sometimes include details which I had to watch 2-3 times to get. One feature I enjoyed was the interviews with various practitioners in the forestry field. I was quite shocked to learn the extent of illegal logging — and that it is related to illegal drugs and human trafficking.
I knew trees were important, but I did not know how important they are or all the ecosystem services they provide until I took this course. One of the more interesting phenomena we learned about was cloud stripping, where the trees take water from low hanging clouds and then it drips, drips down through the canopy and infiltrates into the earth. This enables the river levels to stay constant even in dry seasons. When they clear the trees, then we have floods and dry river beds.
I highly recommend this course! The MOOC was fun. It lasted just four weeks. If you have any interest in such an adventure, I encourage you to try a MOOC.
