Mapping Forests: GEDI Enlists Top Talent to Tackle Climate Change Challenges

New projects aim to analyze forest growth patterns and leverage GEDI observations for climate change mitigation.

The Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI), led by Professor Ralph Dubayah, has recently expanded its research team with the addition of 16 new researchers who will be working on projects through 2026. Among the new cohort, Assistant Professor Laura Duncanson and Assistant Research Professor Lei Ma –-along with Professor and Associate Chair George Hurtt, who is co-investigator on Ma’s project-- have been selected to join GEDI’s Competed Science Team.

Duncanson specializes in remote sensing and focuses primarily on mapping biomass stocks and changes, and working toward applications of biomass products for forest management toward climate change mitigation. Her project, titled “Analyzing Patterns of Forest Growth, Loss and Degradation in Global Protected Areas With GEDI,” is geared towards understanding forest dynamics within protected areas worldwide. Ph.D. students Mengyu Liang and Veronika Leitold helped lead the proposal and will be involved in the research project. Duncanson also plays a pivotal role in the development of footprint Level 4A biomass algorithms and manages the GEDI calibration/validation database comprising global field and airborne lidar datasets.

'I am thrilled to be selected in this round and to extend our previous work using GEDI to study protected areas,” Duncanson remarked. “We look forward to using new GEDI data from when the instrument gets turned back on later this year, which will be the first ever dataset capable of tracking high-resolution forest growth and degradation patterns which are critical to managing forests to maximize their impacts on climate and biodiversity."

Ma's research interests lie in the terrestrial carbon cycle and climate change. His project, “Leveraging GEDI Observations and Mechanistic Ecosystem Modeling To Quantify Forest Regrowth Under a Changing Climate,” aims to enhance the understanding of forest regrowth dynamics in response to climate change. Ma integrates GEDI observations and Ecosystem Demography model (ED v3.0) to constrain historical structural and carbon dynamics in the United States and Brazil, and to reveal their responses to climate change. This work builds upon his previous work that utilized billions of GEDI samples with ED model to capture spatial heterogeneity in current carbon storage and future carbon sequestration potential. 

"This is my first NASA PI grant selected, and it marks a significant milestone in my research career. Having been involved with the GEDI mission since my graduate studies, I now have an exceptional opportunity to deepen my research,” Ma said. “This project will explore decadal advances in remote sensing and ecosystem modeling to help us better understand how forests respond to climate change.”

With Duncanson and Ma joining the GEDI team, their expertise will contribute significantly to advancing our understanding of global forest dynamics and their implications for climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts.

Photo: Laura Duncanson (left) and Lei Ma (right)

Published on Mon, 02/26/2024 - 12:50