Thoreau as Climatologist: Tracking 160 Years of Climate Change (2010)

Lecture by Charles Davis

Over 160 years ago, Henry David Thoreau initiated a study of flowering times at Walden Pond. A research team, including Charles Davis (Harvard) and Richard Primack (Boston University), has updated Thoreau’s records with current data and analyzed them with the tools of modern evolutionary biology. Davis, Assistant Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and Curator in the Harvard Herbarium, explored how an approach that integrates observational and genomic data may be successful in mitigating the impacts of climate change on biodiversity.