to map everything

One man’s plan to map everything

Ecologist Thomas Crowther’s goal is nothing less than restoring the planet. He and his colleagues are amassing thousands of individual observations and weaving them into large-scale conclusions: for example, they have counted the world’s trees (3 trillion) and its most abundant animals, nematode worms (0.4 sextillion). His fans say he is part of a new wave in ecological research, using machine learning on vast, scattered data sets to tease out broad patterns about the state of the planet. His critics think he is trampling on nuance and oversimplifying — sometimes dangerously so.

Nature | 12 min read