Woodlands Revival Adds New Piece to Carbon Cycle Puzzle

Despite continuing concern about the fate of iconic rainforests, new research shows that the world’s forests have stored away an extra 4 billion tonnes of carbon in the last dozen years and the total amount of woodland has increased worldwide since 2003.

The encouraging news comes from Australian scientists, who report in Nature Climate Change that they used a new technique to analyse 20 years of satellite data, to estimate the overall pattern of growth in global vegetation.

The fate of the forests could hardly be more important.  The world’s greenery is part of the natural atmospheric cycle, and the notorious greenhouse effect – the steady rise in carbon dioxide levels in the Earth’s atmosphere since the start of the Industrial Revolution and the use of fossil fuels to power economic growth – is in part also a response to land-use change and forest loss.  Growth requires atmospheric carbon dioxide, and burning and land clearance releases it.
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The Australian scientists are not the only researchers using instruments in high orbit to identify the green shoots of recovery.

Dmitry Shchepashchenko, a researcher at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria, and colleagues report in the journal Remote Sensing of Environment that a cocktail of remote sensing data, UN agency statistics and “crowdsourcing” – help from citizen scientists – has provided new high resolution maps of global forest cover.

This will serve as a basis for other studies, and for economic planning and policy-making. The maps are available on the Geo-Wiki website.

But the overall picture of a greener world remains uncertain. On the same day, scientists backed by the Carnegie Institution in Washington reported in Nature Geoscience that drought damage has already led to widespread forest death, and the toll could be much greater by the 2050s.

Read more at Woodlands Revival Adds New Piece to Carbon Cycle Puzzle