Study Earth’s Forests in 3-D

Very interesting news:

NASA announce the construction of a laser-based instrument that will allow scanning the Earth’s forests and providing crucial information for the Carbon cycle.

The name of the instrument is Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) lidar and it will be constructed at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

 

NASA: Introduction to LIDAR

Piers Sellers, deputy director of Goddard’s Sciences and Exploration Directorate, said that GEDI will be a useful tool to investigate the global vegetation providing global information about the amount of the carbon stored in the forest. Even better, these measurements can be related with old data form instruments (like MODIS) attached in Earth-orbiting satellites.

Bryan Blair, deputy Principal investigator for GEDI at Goddard, adds that his instrument has the ability to measure the tree canopy in high resolution (1 meter) and to be more specific, the height and the internal form of the forest, giving crucial data for the carbon content.

Thus, using principals of the remote sensing, scientist will be capable to estimate the carbon storage in the trees and the carbon fluxes connected with the vegetation by examining the difference in the forest biomass over the time.

 

Image Credit: NASA's GoddardSpace Flight Center

Ralph Dubayah, the GEDI principal investigator at the University of Maryland, conclude that this project opens new fields of research, giving the necessary tools to the scientists to understand more about the relation of the structure of the forest and the carbon net balance. Even more, there will be ways to examine the deforestation and regrowth of the forests in relation with the changes in the land use, flora and fauna biodiversity, the ages of the trees or local climate change.

GEDI will be completed in 2018 and the team consists of co-investigators form Goddard, Woods Hole Research Center, the U.S. Forest Service and Brown University.

See you again with some other current interesting  news  in the next post, and then we will continue with the soil carbon.

Source : Elizabeth Zubritsky (NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland)