Decoding the Data with Thomas Worthley

By Jen­na Out­calt | UConn Jour­nal­ism
Octo­ber 28, 2025

On a col­lege cam­pus as big as UConn, most research can fly right over stu­dents’ heads, even when it’s right under their noses. But behind each project is hours and hours of work and ded­i­ca­tion from rel­a­tive­ly small teams. In Decod­ing the Data, we break down the work that actu­al­ly goes into these stud­ies and the con­text that makes them pos­si­ble. 

Today, we’re look­ing at the envi­ron­ment, and how one team at UConn is try­ing to improve the data we gath­er on forests. To do that, we talk to Thomas Worth­ley, a UConn Exten­sion pro­fes­sor and an advi­sor on today’s project. 

Here’s where to look for more infor­ma­tion about today’s top­ic:

Nature Sci­en­tif­ic Reports

UConn Today

Transcript

Jen­na: 

Hi every­one. Wel­come to Decod­ing the Data, where we take a clos­er look at the research hap­pen­ing right in your back­yard. There’s nev­er a short­age of new research hap­pen­ing on the UConn cam­pus, and envi­ron­men­tal research is no excep­tion. Every day, grad­u­ate stu­dents and pro­fes­sors are inves­ti­gat­ing our cur­rent envi­ron­ment and look­ing at how it could change in the future. 

One such project is by Ph.D. stu­dent Shashika Lama­hewage and advi­sors Chan­di With­a­rana, Rachel Rie­mann, Robert Fahey, and Thomas Worth­ley. They recent­ly con­duct­ed a study to improve the esti­ma­tion of how much car­bon trees can absorb. It’s called a car­bon seques­tra­tion mea­sur­ing mod­el, which feels like a mouth­ful, but is real­ly easy when we break it down, and you’ll hear that in our inter­view today. 

It was cre­at­ed by com­pil­ing mul­ti­ple oth­er meth­ods of obser­va­tion, includ­ing remote sens­ing data and satel­lite imagery. All these obser­va­tions were avail­able through pub­lic data pro­grams. The study says this new mod­el is a piv­otal tool for map­ping how much car­bon a for­est can real­ly absorb and influ­enc­ing envi­ron­men­tal deci­sion mak­ing.  

How­ev­er, the land­scape of envi­ron­men­tal research is chang­ing under the Trump admin­is­tra­tion. Projects focused on cli­mate sci­ence are less like­ly to get fed­er­al grants, and some are even see­ing their fund­ing retroac­tive­ly removed. But the sci­ence com­mu­ni­ty isn’t exact­ly back­ing down. Instead, they’re get­ting a lit­tle cre­ative.  

Today, we speak to Thomas Worth­ley, a UConn pro­fes­sor and one of the advi­sors on the car­bon seques­tra­tion study. He’ll give us some behind-the-scenes insight about the study and share what’s hap­pen­ing in the world of envi­ron­men­tal research while sci­en­tists nav­i­gate the cur­rent polit­i­cal cli­mate of our coun­try. 

Here he is: Thomas Worth­ley. 

Jen­na: 

To start off, can you intro­duce your­self and tell me about your job at UConn and your role on this project?  

Thomas: 

My name is Thomas Worth­ley. I hold the title of exten­sion pro­fes­sor here at UConn and so my pri­ma­ry appoint­ment is in the Depart­ment of Exten­sion. I hold a joint appoint­ment in the Depart­ment of Nat­ur­al Resources in the Envi­ron­ment and as such I occa­sion­al­ly serve on grad­u­ate com­mit­tees. 

I serve is a facil­i­ta­tor pri­mar­i­ly on research projects. I don’t have a research back­ground. I come from more of an engi­neer­ing back­ground and a field forestry back­ground. 

And so my role with research projects is gen­er­al­ly to pro­vide some facil­i­ta­tion to help move things along and do some edit­ing and writ­ing. My field of course is forestry and that’s my back­ground, that’s what I’ve done for the last 45 years.  

Jen­na: 

And with this project, we’re look­ing at car­bon absorp­tion in forests and how we mea­sure it. Can you tell me about how and why this project was con­ceived, what the impor­tance is behind it?  

Thomas: 

Well, the impor­tance has to do with the impli­ca­tions of forests as a mit­i­gat­ing sys­tem if you will, refer­ring to the whole ecosys­tem for tak­ing car­bon diox­ide out of the atmos­phere. 

We have lots of ways of putting car­bon diox­ide into the atmos­phere through the burn­ing of fos­sil fuels and var­i­ous oth­er things, but real­ly the only way only prac­ti­cal way of get­ting car­bon diox­ide out of the atmos­phere is to grow green things as fast as we can, and big green things are bet­ter, of course. 

And so trees are in for­est ecosys­tems are exam­ined quite close most­ly with respect to their role, not only in car­bon stor­age because car­bon stored in wood is stored for a long long time, but also the abil­i­ty of trees to draw car­bon out of the atmos­phere, which is called car­bon seques­tra­tion. 

So the there’s a process called seques­tra­tion where car­bon diox­ide is drawn out of the atmos­phere and then used by the trees or oth­er green plants in the process of pho­to­syn­the­sis and then turned into some kind of organ­ic chem­i­cal that then either becomes hard mate­r­i­al or some­thing else that is stored in the in the organ­ism itself. 

Jen­na: 

So, what are the long-term impli­ca­tions of this par­tic­u­lar project, these kind of new mod­els devel­oped that help us mea­sure that?  

Thomas: 

Well, peo­ple are very inter­est­ed, of course, in the role of the for­est, and one of the very impor­tant things that we need to know if we’re going to study how the role that for­est play in car­bon seques­tra­tion and stor­age is to know how much car­bon is actu­al­ly out there in the land­scape. 

The for­est ecosys­tem has an above ground live bio­mass that rep­re­sents one car­bon pool. There’s a below-ground bio­mass that rep­re­sents anoth­er car­bon pool. There’s a dead­wood com­po­nent that rep­re­sents anoth­er car­bon pool, and we could go on. 

But to be able to deter­mine or esti­mate very close­ly what the total amount of car­bon stored in for­est at this point in time, that gives us a base­line to be able to track changes over the long term. We would like to see that stor­age increased in some way, shape or form so that the for­est could sequester even more car­bon diox­ide out of the atmos­phere. 

But unless we know what we have to start with, it’s hard to pre­dict what’s going to hap­pen.  

Jen­na: 

Yeah, very cool. Sounds like impor­tant stuff. So, are there any moments or anec­dotes from this project that kind of stood out to you? Any big moments you’d like to share with us? 

Thomas: 

Well, the researcher actu­al­ly work­ing on this project uh was chal­lenged by the lack of avail­abil­i­ty of hard data that was con­sis­tent­ly col­lect­ed the same way about the bio­mass in the for­est. Lots of foresters are col­lect­ing infor­ma­tion of this nature for their own uses. The states, the var­i­ous states col­lect this kind of infor­ma­tion for their own uses. The U.S. For­est Ser­vice col­lects this kind of infor­ma­tion for their own uses, but nobody does it exact­ly the same way or for the same rea­sons and so the data isn’t always con­sis­tent. 

And so our lead researcher decid­ed to uti­lize US For­est Ser­vice data, but then again they’re very they’re pro­tec­tive of their data sources and so to be able to uti­lize that data and then use it in a way that they could actu­al­ly build a mod­el off of was the chal­lenge of this this project. 

Well, they man­aged to come up with a method­ol­o­gy that would work, and the excit­ing things were that we did it in a time frame that we could present this infor­ma­tion to foresters in the region at a region­al con­fer­ence, and of course get these pub­li­ca­tions done and then build­ing on the work that was done to be able to acquire fund­ing from a sec­ond grant to con­tin­ue the work. 

That’s prob­a­bly the most excit­ing thing.  

Jen­na: 

That is excit­ing. And just going back to you men­tioned you pre­sent­ed this at a con­fer­ence. What kind of reac­tions did you see from it? What were peo­ple say­ing?  

Thomas: 

Well, because it was A) about remote sens­ing and B) about sta­tis­ti­cal analy­sis, um amongst the crowd at the con­fer­ence, there was a very small sub­set that was pret­ty excit­ed about what was going on. Um, for the rest of us, many of us it was, you know, it was over our heads if you will. 

So, uti­liz­ing new tech­nolo­gies, new tools, and then cre­ative­ly apply­ing sta­tis­ti­cal analy­sis to the infor­ma­tion you’re get­ting from some of these new tools is a big part of what all this is all about.  

Jen­na: 

And if I can kind of zoom out a lit­tle to the greater uh, envi­ron­ment of research right now that we’re in. Obvi­ous­ly, you men­tioned that this project had a lot of reliance and inter­ac­tion with pub­lic data. What is the future of envi­ron­men­tal research, espe­cial­ly under the Trump admin­is­tra­tion where some of that data is either not being col­lect­ed as much or is less pub­licly avail­able?  

Thomas: 

Well, the imme­di­ate impli­ca­tion of reduc­tions in force in terms of num­bers of gov­ern­ment employ­ees uh will make a num­ber of things dif­fi­cult to process in a time­ly fash­ion. 

The data still exists and the means to access it still exists, but you may put in a request and what might have tak­en a week before might take, you know, four months now. Um, some grant fund­ing will still be avail­able if it meets the inter­ests of the cur­rent admin­is­tra­tion, but a lot of grant fund­ing might not be.  

And um, for exam­ple, there’s not a lot of inter­est in cli­mate. And so, if we talk about car­bon seques­tra­tion and car­bon stor­age. Why, it may not receive a favor­able reac­tion if we’re apply­ing for grant fund­ing from the gov­ern­ment. On the oth­er hand, if we do the exact same thing, only if we talk about grow­ing wood, it might get a pos­i­tive reac­tion. 

Jen­na: 

So it’s look­ing at it like a strate­gic mat­ter some­times. 

Thomas: 

Strate­gic com­mu­ni­ca­tion, I think, might be the way to exam­ine it. When we’re actu­al­ly, when we’re stor­ing car­bon, seques­ter­ing car­bon, we’re grow­ing wood is exact­ly what we’re doing. So, that’s how we talk about it.  

Jen­na: 

Have you already seen some of those kind of strate­gic com­mu­ni­ca­tion moves from peo­ple in your depart­ment in the school? 

Thomas:  

Well, yes. We’ve seen some, and we’ve seen some exist­ing grants kind of re-ori­ent­ed to focus more on one thing than anoth­er and those that did­n’t get fund­ing pulled that are still in effect might be con­cen­trat­ing on one aspect as opposed to anoth­er aspect.  

Jen­na: 

Is there any­thing else on the project that sticks out to you? That you think, maybe some behind the scenes that peo­ple might not real­ize just about under­tak­ing a project like this? 

Thomas: 

Projects of this nature have a have a mul­ti­ple ben­e­fit aspect to them, in the fact that, yes, we’re adding to the body of sci­en­tif­ic lit­er­a­ture. Uh, we are doing cre­ative work with respect to analy­sis and mod­el build­ing. But at the same time, the lead author, for exam­ple, on this study is a per­son who’s work­ing on a degree and com­plet­ing a mas­ter’s the­sis or some­thing like that. And this project is con­tribut­ing to that process. And at the same time, there might be oth­er peo­ple who are dove­tail­ing with this project who are going through the same process. 

The next step would be for that stu­dent who wants to con­tin­ue in aca­d­e­mics to pur­sue a Ph.D. And if this project can set up to be expand­ed on and become a Ph.D. dis­ser­ta­tion, then that’s anoth­er added ben­e­fit. 

If the pro­fes­sor who is the main advi­sor can then take what’s being learned here and pass it on to stu­dents either in for­mal class set­tings or in sem­i­nar set­tings, then there’s a mul­ti­ple edu­ca­tion­al ben­e­fit there. 

If I can go to my col­leagues and begin to talk about a mod­el we have for pre­dict­ing the total amount of car­bon in a cer­tain land­scape that can get their inter­est.  

Jen­na: 

Well, thank you so much for speak­ing with me today. I real­ly appre­ci­ate it.  

Thomas: 

Well, thank you for com­ing and thank you for includ­ing me.  

Jen­na: 

Hap­py to! 

Jen­na: 

This project was fea­tured in Nature Sci­en­tif­ic Reports as well as UConn today. Both are linked in the descrip­tion if you’d like to learn more about this amaz­ing research. Accord­ing to UConn Today, this mod­el will con­tin­ue to be used in future stud­ies and applied to data sets in larg­er for­est areas such as in New York and in New Hamp­shire. A huge thank you to Thomas Wor­ley for let­ting me join him in his office and hear all about this project. Thank you for tun­ing in and we’ll see you next time.