DIAS Wild Wednesday: Reimagining and Reinventing the Relationship Between Humanity and the Rest of the Biosphere, by DIAS Chair Samuel Cushman

Humanity stands at a critical crossroads. To secure our future, we must move beyond simply documenting the decline of the natural world and start actively designing its recovery. This lecture introduces a bold new way of seeing the Earth—not as a collection of isolated "patches" of green, but as a living, continuous flow of energy and life. By combining the power of big data and advanced AI with a new understanding of how landscapes function, we can now move from guessing to knowing. Dr. Cushman explores how we can identify the "sweet spot" of land management: the B-C-H Nexus. This is the precise point where our decisions simultaneously protect biodiversity, stabilize the climate, and improve human well-being. Join us to discover how we are reinventing science to provide a roadmap for a planet where both nature and people thrive. 

About Samuel Cushman
Samuel Cushman is a quantitative spatial ecologist and landscape ecologist who specializes in understanding and predicting the patterns, processes, and impacts of ecological change at scales from genes to the biosphere.He comes here from a recent position as Chief Science Officer for the big data analytics company TerrAdapt and a Senior Research Fellowship at the University of Oxford Wildlife Conservation Research Unit.He worked more than 20 years as a research scientist for the United States government and was director of the Center for Landscape Science, a United States Forest Service Research Center of Excellence. He earned a PhD at the University Massachusetts, an MS at Western Washington University and a BS at the Evergreen State College.

This event is organized by DIAS Chair Samuel Cushman