Without a strategy to maintain the world's forests, we may as well give up on climate change and accept our fate. Trees are that important. Deforestation contributes about 15% of all greenhouse gases, because a lot of a tree's mass is carbon. When you cut it down or burn it, you're effectively releasing CO2 into the atmosphere. We need trees as carbon "sinks"—they're the best storage devices we have.
For the last several years, Greg Asner has been mapping some of the most important forests in the world, not only measuring how many trees are left but also their capacity as climate remediation machines. He flies above the canopy in the Carnegie Airborne Observatory (CAO), a souped up twin-engine plane. On-board are two pieces of equipment: a LIDAR machine and a spectrometer. The LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) bounces laser signals off the trees at a rate of about 500,000 pulses per second, mapping in 3-D detail. The spectrometer measures for 21 chemical traits and gives a sense of the carbon stock and tree species diversity.
The key insight from Asner's work is that not all forests are equal. Temperature, precipitation, soil, geology and terrain affect a tree's ability to sequester carbon. The CAO is able to show which areas of forest are most important from a climate point of view and where we might have the most impact by replanting.
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