For decades, scientists have sought more effective ways to calculate the amount of carbon stored in forests, grasslands and mangroves.
Then, in 2018, NASA started a mission called the Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (or GEDI, pronounced like the order of knights in “Star Wars”) that deployed a sensor in space with the power to make precise 3-D measurements of the vegetation below.
“That was, really, a very important missing piece to our understanding of the global carbon cycle,” said Ralph Dubayah, the mission’s principal investigator.
For the study published this year, researchers working with GEDI used the data to compare hundreds of thousands of protected areas around the world — including Californian redwoods, Indonesian mangroves and European woodlands — to an aggregate of areas that were similar in the year 2000 but had been left unprotected.
Then they calculated how much carbon held by each of these ecosystems would have been lost to the atmosphere without protections.”
Karen