Forest Monitoring Makes First Page of The New York Times

Associate Professor Laura Duncanson, co-investigator for the Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI), talks about the role of satellite data to better understand how much carbon the Amazon forest stores — based on research for the NASA-Smithsonian's GEO-TREES project. 

With the help of a small rope tied around his ankles, Eugenio Sánchez, lithe at age 50, shimmied himself all the way up a towering tree like a human inchworm, his chest heaving from the exertion, just to pick a few leaves.

The leaves, found only on the highest branches, would help the scientists waiting below identify the species. And that, along with the tree’s exact size (or at least as close as one can approximate a tree’s size) would tell them something very important: how much carbon it contained.

The team, wearing gumboots caked with mud, were at the beginning of a monthslong process of painstakingly measuring pretty much every woody plant growing on this patch of Amazon rainforest in Colombia, one by one. A census of all 125,000 individual plants with a trunk size at least a centimeter in diameter.

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The data gathered at sites like these will be married with data from satellites that peer down from space and categorize trees based on characteristics that are visible from above. But most satellites can’t reliably penetrate the forest’s thick canopy.

“You can only get truly accurate carbon measurements by combining satellite data with ground-truthing,” said Laura Duncanson, a remote sensing expert at the University of Maryland. “Like, I’m talking tree-hugging.”

Tropical forest and other land absorbs one-third of all the world’s planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions. The Amazon, despite its immensity, is actually particularly fragile. This year, fires in the Brazilian Amazon hit a 14-year high. The whole region was bathed in smoke as the team did its work recently.

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Work of this kind sheds light on dynamics in the Amazon that are far from obvious.

For instance, new studies posit that, despite the arboreal biodiversity, about half of the region’s carbon is contained in just 2 percent or so of its species. And those species, typically enormous hardwood trees, may be the most susceptible to climate change (and illegal logging).

It would logically follow that the most effective steps to take would focus on protecting those trees. But it takes this kind of research to know that. “The dark age of tropical data scarcity might be ending,” said Dr. Duncanson, the remote sensing expert.

Image: For much of the year, this area in the Amazon is flooded. But the August dry season, plus drought, kept waters low. Published by The New York Times.

Published on Thu, 09/12/2024 - 10:23