Monitoring tropical forest carbon stocks and emissions using Planet satellite data.

Tropical forests are crucial for mitigating climate change, but many forests continue to be driven from carbon sinks to sources through human activities. To support more sustainable forest uses, we need to measure and monitor carbon stocks and emissions at high spatial and temporal resolution. We developed the first large-scale very high-resolution map of aboveground carbon stocks and emissions for the country of Peru by combining 6.

Landscape-Scale Controls on Aboveground Forest Carbon Stocks on the Osa Peninsula, Costa Rica.

Tropical forests store large amounts of carbon in tree biomass, although the environmental controls on forest carbon stocks remain poorly resolved. Emerging airborne remote sensing techniques offer a powerful approach to understand how aboveground carbon density (ACD) varies across tropical landscapes. In this study, we evaluate the accuracy of the Carnegie Airborne Observatory (CAO) Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) system to detect top-of-canopy tree height (TCH) and ACD across the Osa Peninsula, Costa Rica.

Targeted carbon conservation at national scales with high-resolution monitoring.

Terrestrial carbon conservation can provide critical environmental, social, and climate benefits. Yet, the geographically complex mosaic of threats to, and opportunities for, conserving carbon in landscapes remain largely unresolved at national scales. Using a new high-resolution carbon mapping approach applied to Perú, a megadiverse country undergoing rapid land use change, we found that at least 0.

These are the days of lasers in the jungle.

For tropical forest carbon to be commoditized, a consistent, globally verifiable system for reporting and monitoring carbon stocks and emissions must be achieved. We call for a global airborne LiDAR campaign that will measure the 3-D structure of each hectare of forested (and formerly forested) land in the tropics. We believe such a database could be assembled for only 5% of funding already pledged to offset tropical forest carbon emissions.

Carbon storage landscapes of lowland Hawaii: the role of native and invasive species through space and time.

Tropical forests are important storehouses of carbon and biodiversity. In isolated island ecosystems such as the Hawaiian Islands, relative dominance of native and nonnative tree species may influence patterns of forest carbon stocks and biodiversity. We determined aboveground carbon density (ACD) across a matrix of lava flows differing in age, texture, and vegetation composition (i.

A tale of two "forests": random forest machine learning AIDS tropical forest carbon mapping.

Accurate and spatially-explicit maps of tropical forest carbon stocks are needed to implement carbon offset mechanisms such as REDD+ (Reduced Deforestation and Degradation Plus). The Random Forest machine learning algorithm may aid carbon mapping applications using remotely-sensed data. However, Random Forest has never been compared to traditional and potentially more reliable techniques such as regionally stratified sampling and upscaling, and it has rarely been employed with spatial data.

Hydrological networks and associated topographic variation as templates for the spatial organization of tropical forest vegetation.

An understanding of the spatial variability in tropical forest structure and biomass, and the mechanisms that underpin this variability, is critical for designing, interpreting, and upscaling field studies for regional carbon inventories. We investigated the spatial structure of tropical forest vegetation and its relationship to the hydrological network and associated topographic structure across spatial scales of 10-1000 m using high-resolution maps of LiDAR-derived mean canopy profile height (MCH) and elevation for 4930 ha of tropical forest in central Panama. MCH was strongly associated with the hydrological network: canopy height was highest in areas of positive convexity (valleys, depressions) close to channels draining 1 ha or more.

High-fidelity national carbon mapping for resource management and REDD+.

Background: High fidelity carbon mapping has the potential to greatly advance national resource management and to encourage international action toward climate change mitigation. However, carbon inventories based on field plots alone cannot capture the heterogeneity of carbon stocks, and thus remote sensing-assisted approaches are critically important to carbon mapping at regional to global scales. We advanced a high-resolution, national-scale carbon mapping approach applied to the Republic of Panama - one of the first UN REDD + partner countries.

Human and environmental controls over aboveground carbon storage in Madagascar.

Background: Accurate, high-resolution mapping of aboveground carbon density (ACD, Mg C ha-1) could provide insight into human and environmental controls over ecosystem state and functioning, and could support conservation and climate policy development. However, mapping ACD has proven challenging, particularly in spatially complex regions harboring a mosaic of land use activities, or in remote montane areas that are difficult to access and poorly understood ecologically. Using a combination of field measurements, airborne Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) and satellite data, we present the first large-scale, high-resolution estimates of aboveground carbon stocks in Madagascar.

A universal airborne LiDAR approach for tropical forest carbon mapping.

Airborne light detection and ranging (LiDAR) is fast turning the corner from demonstration technology to a key tool for assessing carbon stocks in tropical forests. With its ability to penetrate tropical forest canopies and detect three-dimensional forest structure, LiDAR may prove to be a major component of international strategies to measure and account for carbon emissions from and uptake by tropical forests. To date, however, basic ecological information such as height-diameter allometry and stand-level wood density have not been mechanistically incorporated into methods for mapping forest carbon at regional and global scales.

High-resolution forest carbon stocks and emissions in the Amazon.

Efforts to mitigate climate change through the Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) depend on mapping and monitoring of tropical forest carbon stocks and emissions over large geographic areas. With a new integrated use of satellite imaging, airborne light detection and ranging, and field plots, we mapped aboveground carbon stocks and emissions at 0.1-ha resolution over 4.