Madrid. A NASA instrument on the International Space Station (ISS) has provided the first global estimate of forest biomass and the carbon it stores, filling a key gap in climate research.
The data makes it possible to investigate how forests are changing, what role they play in mitigating climate change, and the regional and global impacts of planting and cutting down trees.
With the GEDI (Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation) instrument, ecosystem and climate researchers can quickly locate their regions of interest and study forest structure and carbon content with greater precision than in the past.
The launch of the new biomass product comes as GEDI is within a one-year mission extension and represents the culmination of critical advances in space lidar (a type of laser) research.
specific design
GEDI is a high resolution lidar instrument specifically designed to measure vegetation. From its vantage point aboard space station, the instrument rapidly bounces laser pulses off the trees and bushes below to create detailed 3D maps of forests and landforms. The resulting data product, processed and gridded at a resolution of one square kilometer, enables researchers to seek solutions to questions about forest ecosystems, animal habitats, carbon content and climate change.
In its first three years in orbit, GEDI has collected billions of measurements between 51.6 degrees north and south latitude (roughly London and the Falkland Islands, respectively).
The new product combines GEDI data with ground and airborne lidars to build a global biomass map that reveals the amount of vegetation contained in an area.
“A large area of uncertainty is that we don’t know how much carbon is stored in Earth’s forests,” Ralph Dubayah, GEDI principal investigator and professor of geographic sciences at the University of Maryland, said in a statement. Trees extract it from the atmosphere to fuel their growth. However, scientists need to know how much forests store to predict how much will be released by deforestation or wildfires. About half of plant biomass is composed of that element.
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