Narration:

Transcript:

We are looking at a profile of ICESat-2 data over northern Botswana, which is described as a semi-arid savanna woodland. In this profile the vegetation is dominated by shrub mopani, which is typically in the two to three meter range. And there’s also some mopani and acacia trees that typically are in the four to six meter height range. Something that scientists need to understand and quantify is where carbon is being taken up and where it is already being stored. Because much of the effort to mapping global biomass has been really focused in the tropics where the trees are large and the biomass is high, many of these savanna and woodland ecosystems tend to get neglected or are poorly characterized in global carbon accounting efforts. This capability to determine vegetation height should help reduce the uncertainty in global biomass estimates.