David Foster is an ecologist and director of the Harvard Forest at Harvard University, where he has been a faculty member in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology since 1983. He is the author of Thoreau’s Country - Journey through a Transformed Landscape (1999), New England Forests Through Time (2000; both Harvard University Press) and Forests in Time - The Environmental Consequences of 1000 years of Change in New England (2004; Yale University Press). David is the Principal Investigator for the Harvard Forest LTER program, which involves more than 50 researchers, 25 graduate students, and 30 undergraduates from across the Northeast investigating the dynamics of New England landscape.