Scientists from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
along with their international collaborators have demonstrated a new method
for mapping the location and size of trees growing outside of forests.
The big surprise?
They discovered an unexpectedly high number of trees in semi-arid regions,
often thought of as too dry to support plant life.
Mapping non-forest trees with this level of precision was
previously impossible across broad areas.
This technology represents a breakthrough
for mapping and measuring these trees.
Using powerful supercomputers and machine learning algorithms,
the team mapped the crown size
which is the width of a tree when viewed from above
of more than 1.8 billion trees across an area of
more than half a million square miles.
This study is the first in a series whose goal
is not only to map non-forest trees across a wide area,
but also to calculate how much carbon they store
vital information for understanding the carbon cycle and how it is changing over time.