Planet Earth Has Much More Forest Than Thought: Earth’s Forests Just Grew 9% In A New Satellite Survey, by The Conversation.
A new global analysis of the distribution of forests and woodlands has “found” 467 million hectares of previously unreported forest -– an area equivalent to 60% of the size of Australia.
The discovery increases the known amount of global forest cover by around 9% …
The new forests were found by surveying “drylands” –- so called because they receive much less water in precipitation than they lose through evaporation and plant transpiration. As we and our colleagues report today in the journal Science, these drylands contain 45% more forest than has been found in previous surveys.
We found new dryland forest on all inhabited continents, but mainly in sub-Saharan Africa, around the Mediterranean, central India, coastal Australia, western South America, northeastern Brazil, northern Colombia and Venezuela, and northern parts of the boreal forests in Canada and Russia. In Africa, our study has doubled the amount of known dryland forest.
Google Earth discovers the trees:
With current satellite imagery and mapping techniques, it might seem amazing that these forests have stayed hidden in plain sight for so long. But this type of forest was previously difficult to measure globally, because of the relatively low density of trees.
What’s more, previous surveys were based on older, low-resolution satellite images that did not include ground validation. In contrast, our study used higher-resolution satellite imagery available through Google Earth Engine –- including images of more than 210,000 dryland sites -– and used a simple visual interpretation of tree number and density. A sample of these sites were compared with field information to assess accuracy.
The world’s drylands: forests in green
Scientists discover an extra 5 million square kilometers of forest, just like that, by Joanne Nova.
Scientists apparently can’t predict where forests are right now, but weather patterns one hundred years from now, no problem. It’s nearly 60 years since the first satellite was launched, and we are still figuring out basic stuff down here on the surface — like which bits are forest.
People are willing to set up a two trillion dollar global market to trade carbon, but their carbon models are so primitive that giant “oops” moments are still happening on a regular basis. In 2014 Indian accountants discovered they’d missed nearly half the carbon given off from their lakes and rivers. In 2015, an accounting error reduced China’s emissions by twice Australia’s output. Then later that year Yale guys found 2.6 trillion trees. Blame global warming. Forests are appearing everywhere. Trees are even growing on farms capturing 0.75 gigaton of carbon that no one noticed til last year.
