Figuring out what the Earth’s climate is going to do at any given point is a difficult task. To know how it will react to given events, you need to know what you’re working with. This requires an accurate model of everything from ocean currents to atmospheric heat absorption and the chemical and literal behavior of everything from cattle to humans to trees.
In the latter regard, scientists need to know how many trees we have to properly model the climate. This is key, as trees play a major role in the carbon cycle by turning carbon dioxide into oxygen plus wood. But how do you count trees at a continental scale? You’ll probably want to get yourself a nice satellite to do the job.
How Many Are There?!
Thankfully, some of the bright minds over at NASA are on the job. In partnership with an international team of scientists, they have been mapping out trees across vast tracts of Africa. The aim of the project was to get an idea of just how much scarbon is stored across Africa’s drylands, as opposed to the dense tropical rainforests in the region.
To count the tree populations across such a wide area, the team relied on high-resolution satellite imagery from commerical providers. Once the purview of governments only, now it’s easy enough to stump up some cash and get all the high-resolution space photography you could possibly imagine. The team sourced a dataset of 326,000 satellite images from the QuickBird-2, GeoEye1, WorldView-2, and Worldview-3 satellites, all run by Maxar Technologies. The images had a resoluti ..
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