A first: NASA counts all the trees on Earth
NASA is counting trees that had never been included in the maps. A breakthrough for research and the fight against global warming.
Technology to account for all trees on Earth
Researchers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, are teaming up with international scientists to map all trees on Earth and thereby establish the basis for measuring planetary carbon storage.
The mapping of these unpublished data required more than a year of preparation. The team integrated a powerful calculation algorithm on one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, the University of Illinois’ Blue Waters. They thus formed a model capable of recognizing individual trees, or small groups of trees, over multiple terrains. To do this, scientists manually surveyed 90,000 individual trees using high-resolution satellite images from West Africa. This region has the advantage of having arid and semi-arid zones where many isolated trees grow; these have never been included in previous assessments. In addition to locating and counting the trees; the program measures the diameter, coverage, and density of their crowns, i.e. from the top of the trunk to all the branches. As a result, they can analyze variations in these data according to land use and climate.
A better understanding of deforestation and global warming
The region is not ideal terrain for vegetation, yet the study revealed the existence of more than 1.8 billion trees over 1,300,000 km2! Surprising results prove that researchers are filling in incomplete maps. The data collected is also a tool for measuring global carbon storage. In this regard, NASA scientist Dr. Tucker says, “Our goal is to see how much carbon is in isolated trees in the vast arid and semi-arid regions of the world,” and “then we need to understand the mechanism that leads to CO2 storage in arid and semi-arid areas. ». This technological advance, therefore, collects essential data to accurately measure global deforestation. We now have a benchmark for assessing the future effectiveness of our environmental protection efforts.
The Earth needs trees
NASA has set up optimal cartography because those previously carried out include only forests. Knowing the exact number of trees populating our planet is a major challenge at a time when deforestation is seriously impacting our biodiversity. Deforestation, along with industry and the emission of fossil fuels, emits CO2 into the atmosphere. The presence of this greenhouse gas has never been so high, even though it is a major contributor to global warming. A problem to which trees can respond…
“The whole planet is overheating, it is urgent to put it in the shade of trees”, Nathalie de Noblet, one of the coordinators of the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Sources: Good News Network; Science et Vie; Notre Planete
Photo Credits :@juanita770427/Unsplash ;@lukealrich/Unsplash
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