Professor Yadvinder Malhi, Director of the Oxford Centre for Tropical Forests, has been a key advisor to an extraordinary exhibition which is appearing this week in London’s Trafalgar Square. The 'Ghost Forest' exhibition features 10 immense rainforest tree stumps from Ghana, most with their buttress roots still attached.
The exhibition seeks to raise public awareness of the connections between deforestation and climate change, and is the work of Oxford artist Angela Palmer. After their week in Trafalgar Square, the tree stumps will travel on to Copenhagen to coincide with the UN Climate Change Conference in December.
All the stumps in this exhibition come from a regulated, commercially logged tropical rainforest in Ghana. Professor Malhi is currently on sabbatical in Ghana, where he continues his research on tropical forests, leading new field work on forest carbon dynamics. Professor Malhi and his team have already done considerable work on forest carbon dynamics in the Amazon but very little is known for the great forests of the Congo and West Africa.
You can see more of the exhibition in this BBC video.