Warning to forest destroyers: this scientist will catch you
The article below appeared online in the journal Nature on October 4th and features Professor Matthew Hansen from the Department of Geographical Sciences.
By Gabriel Popkin, Nature
Ask Matthew Hansen to show off his data and he hunches over his computer like a possessed video gamer. With a few mouse clicks, he flies over the globe and zooms in on a forest in Indonesia. The area is designated as a preserve — supposedly protected from deforestation — but Hansen's data reveal a different reality. Bird's-eye images of the trees taken every eight days flash by on the screen. At first, a few red spots perforate the green canopy around the preserve's edge. Then they spread, like bloodstains. “That's got to be illegal fires,” he says. “The forest is getting chewed up.”
Hansen is among the world's foremost forest sentries. In 2013, he and his colleagues used satellite data to produce the first global, high-resolution maps of where trees are growing and disappearing1. Those images revealed some large-scale patterns for the first time, such as that Indonesia had nearly equalled Brazil as the country with the world's highest rate of tropical deforestation. Since then, his team has refined its methods and can now reveal the loss of trees within days.
Click here to read the rest of the article online.
Published on Thu, Oct 6, 2016 - 1:47PM