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"This New NASA Mission Will Create an Unprecedented,.." Topic


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Tango0105 Dec 2018 9:07 p.m. PST

…3D Map of Earth's Forests

"The secret to stabilizing Earth's climate could rest in the world's forests. That's why, this week, a team of researchers is sending a high-tech reconnaissance operative to the International Space Station to figure out how much carbon is stored in our planet's trees.

Tucked inside the next SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, and armed only with a laser altimeter, the Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) waits for deployment. Launching on December 4, this first-of-its-kind LIDAR instrument is designed to map the world's forests in 3D, and by doing so give us better estimates of their biomass and how much carbon they store.

Earth's forests, like the oceans, soak up carbon from the atmosphere. But deforestation and other disturbances can cause that carbon to be released, and we still have a lot to learn about which forests are carbon sinks and which are carbon sources on a global scale. According to Ralph Dubayah, a professor of geographical sciences at the University of Maryland and the the principal investigator for GEDI, it's going to be hard to predict future concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere without that information…."
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Amicalement
Armand

Bowman06 Dec 2018 5:56 a.m. PST

The social conditions have to first change so that poor subsistence farmers don't continually cut down more rain forest. On the other end of the scale we have big agri-business doing the same.

This hasn't changed much in the last decade:

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Andrew Walters06 Dec 2018 8:50 a.m. PST

This is an important mission, and will also provide valuable new input to climate models – which are underperforming at the moment, imho. So this is great, but…

Algae grows faster than forests. At some point, either deliberately or not, we may have a lot more algae, and that may be a good thing or a bad thing.

But I don't want to trigger thread drift. Knowing more about the forests is essential.

Tango0106 Dec 2018 11:53 a.m. PST

Interesting….


Amicalement
Armand

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