New NASA project at UMaine will use lasers from space to map carbon in forests
Researchers from the Wheatland Geospatial Laboratory (WGL) in the University of Maine School of Forest Resources and the Center for Research on Sustainable Forests (CRSF) have been selected to join NASA’s Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) Science Team.
The three-year research project was awarded $500,000 to map carbon stocks and changes across a large and complex forest region using data from NASA’s newly launched ecosystem LiDAR (Light Detecting and Ranging) instrument, orbiting the Earth on the International Space Station.
WGL director Daniel Hayes and CRSF director Aaron Weiskittel will join colleagues at Michigan State University and the University of Minnesota to harness the data as part of the FORest Carbon Estimation (FORCE) project.
The team will develop and test their mapping methods at research sites in Maine, New Brunswick, Ontario and Minnesota, and then apply the approach across the larger temperate-boreal transition forest of northeastern North America, which will be a challenging demonstration of GEDI data. The mix of tree species either at the northern or southern limit of their ranges come together in a complex, extensively managed forest region spanning two countries.
A full news release about the project is online.
Contact: Meg Ferguson, 207.581.3794