Their CDK inhibitor conclusion that termites have a prominent (if not dominant) role in C processing, equalling or surpassing those of grazing mammals and bushfires, was and is widely cited to justify many kinds of subsequent research in termite ecology, despite the explicit caveat added by Wood that systems in which

soil-feeding termites are active may have a different character. This warning was cogent: recent work has shown that the basis of soil-feeder digestion is the dissimilation of immobilised peptidic components of soil organic matter, already highly humified, and hence there may be multiple ecological impacts by this functional group in soil profiles. Wood (with Mark Collins) was also the first, in 1984, to estimate the number and biomass of termites in the biosphere (their results were one trillion individuals and 700 million metric tonnes weight), seemingly a trivial pursuit but with the serious purpose of calculating how much climate-warming methane they release (the modern answer, partly based on Wood’s approach, is less gas than feared). While it is now agreed that termites contribute between 2% and 5% of turnover in the global carbon cycle, their role in maintaining soil health has only been fully acknowledged in recent times, confirming Wood’s earlier thesis that termites are not only the

engineers but also the conservators of numerous tropical landscapes, a fact of huge importance for the future of food production by the world’s poorest farmers. Target Selective Inhibitor Library ic50 A final review ( Wood, 1996), less well known, draws attention to the pivotal role of the Macrotermitinae in African and Asian savannas. At school, Tom Wood showed promise as a long-distance runner. Tall, lean and endowed with North Country grit, his life in science was paralleled by

a second career in athletics, which culminated in winning the South Australia Marathon Championship in 1972. He ran 2 hours 20 minutes, still the third fastest time in the history of the event, and narrowly missed selection for the Munich Olympics. Returning to the UK in the same year, Wood joined the scientific civil service, taking charge of a long-term agriculture project at Mokwa, pheromone in the Southern Guinea Savanna of Nigeria, for the (then) Centre for Overseas Pest Research, a world-class scientific institution based in Kensington. The Mokwa study became a classic of tropical field ecology, seminal in the growth of the modern discipline of soil biodiversity. The team’s conclusion that termites have a prominent (if not dominant) role in carbon processing, equalling or surpassing those of grazing mammals and bushfires, prompted many comparable studies elsewhere, the quantitative field approach being broadly transferable to other tropical habitats, especially forest margins where land use change is most intense and soil fertility most threatened.