New NASA map shows tropical forest carbon storage
By Tannith Cattermole
A NASA-led research team has created a new map using ground and satellite data that accurately quantifies the amount and location of carbon stored in Earth’s tropical trees and forests. Based on data from the early 2000s, the map focuses on 2.5 million hectares of tropical forest in seventy-five countries. Data shows that tropical forests contain 247 billion tons of carbon, and of this carbon stock, almost half is held in Latin American forests. Almost the same carbon stock is stored in sub-Saharan Africa in its entirety, compared with 61 billion tons of carbon stored in Brazilian forests alone.
“These patterns of carbon storage, which we really didn’t know before, depend on climate, soil, topography and the history of human or natural disturbance of the forests,” said leading researcher Sassan Saatchi of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “Areas often impacted by disturbance, human or natural, have lower carbon storage.”
Up to a fifth of global carbon emissions are caused by deforestation and forest degradation, mainly in tropical areas. Carbon is stored in the wood and roots, but when trees are cut, burned or decompose, carbon is released into the atmosphere. Previous studies have only taken carbon measurements from individual countries or continents, and usually by calculating carbon from ground-based observations of tree heights. This is the first time researchers have achieved a pan-continental overview, across varying forest types and structures using the same methodology.