What’s with the name you may ask…
That is easy. The name is actually a play on words. Sometime in 2010 or 2011 while listening to a Science Friday podcast the term Natural Philosopher was used. This term was used for anyone that studied the sciences or tried to understand how the world around them worked. No doubt an oversimplification of the term hence the link to Wikipedia above. But the concept of learning all one could know about the topic of nature and the world around you is a huge concept.
With that said there are still so many things that people don’t understand about the world around them. In the case of this site, the focus will be natural resources. The term Forestry will be used to cover this overarching topic. Who more than foresters need to understand how the interactions between trees, plants, wildlife, weather, climate, recreation and so much more work.
Forestry is not the dirty word that society has come to see it. Ever talk to a forester? You may be surprised they have many of the same concerns and possibly more about natural resources that you do.
So what is this site to accomplish? The goal is simply to bring the professionals and enthusiasts around the world together to better understand how nature works and support each other. How is that to be done? Some basic notions:
- anyone can participate in coming up with new ideas. Some of the best ideas come from people that just observe something with no preconceived notion and say “does that work this way?”
- DATA, DATA, DATA. The weakness in natural resources is quickly becoming even weaker is the source, maintenance and archiving of data.
- Funding. Need more be said?
- Exciting a new generation to fill in a shrinking group of researchers
What does that translate to?
- Standardization of data
- Storing of data
- Distribution of data
- Archiving and distributing results of research
- “Crowd Sourcing” work
- “Kick-Starting” projects
- Best Management Practices (BMPs)
- Modeling
- Education at all levels
- Public information (Press and News)
To accomplish all this we MUST move FORWARD or lose it all. This has never been more critical than NOW! The loss of budgets and the “Old Guard” is rapidly putting us back to the beginning when we have already come so far. We need to all come together and share what we know and not let old attitudes of “this is my project and i am not sharing” come in to play.