Sarah Batterman

Sarah Batterman researches the storage of CO₂ in tropical forests and how nutrient levels in the ecosystem can hinder or encourage forest growth.

At Agua Salud, Sarah observed that tropical trees were able to soak up CO₂ from the atmosphere to re-build a rainforest very rapidly following deforestation. She discovered that this was because specific trees related to beans would form a symbiosis with nitrogen-fixing bacteria—microorganisms that can transform nitrogen from the atmosphere into fixed nitrogen usable by plants. These nitrogen-fixing trees are powerful enough to supply more than half of the nitrogen needed to rebuild a forest capable of storing half as much CO₂ as a mature forest, within a few decades. 

Sarah is now working with Jefferson Hall and others at Agua Salud to test how different nutrients constrain nitrogen fixation and forest recovery in a large-scale fertilization experiment. This research will help address whether tropical forests will serve as a carbon sink in the future and offset CO₂ emissions from fossil fuels.

Sarah was a Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute Short-Term Fellow while a PhD student at Princeton University and is currently a faculty member at the University of Leeds, U.K.