{"id":206567,"date":"2022-04-11T10:19:01","date_gmt":"2022-04-11T14:19:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/earth-and-environmental-studies\/?p=206567"},"modified":"2022-10-19T11:47:06","modified_gmt":"2022-10-19T15:47:06","slug":"tracking-forest-biomass-and-disturbance-with-nasas-misr","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/earth-and-environmental-studies\/2022\/04\/11\/tracking-forest-biomass-and-disturbance-with-nasas-misr\/","title":{"rendered":"Tracking forest biomass and disturbance with NASA’s MISR"},"content":{"rendered":"

Climate warming and drying are leading to more frequent, extensive, hotter, and more destructive wildfires in the Needleleaf forests of the arid southwest: instead of just clearing out undergrowth, the trees are killed and soils are seared, making it harder for saplings to take root and increasing runoff.<\/p>\n

Interactions between people, forests, and the climate can result in a rapid flip to a new stable state that is far less friendly to people<\/em> and has impacts much further afield: in recent years, smoke from western wildfires has started to impact the air in our region; see this July 2021 MSU news article<\/a>. Scientists also want to know how much carbon is lost (or gained) in forests over time, so we use remote sensing from satellites to map forest aboveground biomass (AGB, units: Mg ha-1).<\/p>\n

In 2000 NASA launched a satellite called Terra that carries five instruments, including the Multi-angle Imaging Spectro-Radiometer (MISR) that has nine cameras viewing at different angles and in four wavelengths (blue, green, red, and near-infared). A ratio of measurements of reflected red light from MISR provides a multi-angle index<\/em> that yields more precise AGB estimates than single-angle multispectral imagery. Below, a subset shows the net change in forest AGB 2000-2015 for part of northern California.<\/p>\n

<\/div>
\n
\"Terra<\/figure>\n<\/div><\/div>\n

This work is reported in Remote Sensing of Environment<\/em><\/a> (Impact Factor: 10.2). The dataset has also been extended to 2021 and published at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory Distributed Active Archive Center<\/a>. We hope the map series will help ecologists and foresters to improve our understanding of the changes being seen in southwestern forests; and how the progression of these changes might affect people living in this region in the coming decades as the regional climate warms and dries.<\/p>\n

Read the Full Publication on Elsevier<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dr. Mark Chopping, Professor, Earth and Environmental Studies, and colleagues have published NASA-funded research to map aboveground biomass and disturbance in southwestern forests using multi-angle imaging.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":206569,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-206567","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-research","category-faculty"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/earth-and-environmental-studies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206567","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/earth-and-environmental-studies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/earth-and-environmental-studies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/earth-and-environmental-studies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/earth-and-environmental-studies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=206567"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/earth-and-environmental-studies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206567\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":206647,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/earth-and-environmental-studies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206567\/revisions\/206647"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/earth-and-environmental-studies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/206569"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/earth-and-environmental-studies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=206567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/earth-and-environmental-studies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=206567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/earth-and-environmental-studies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=206567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}