Borneo’s rainforest may get high-tech #3D scan to boost conservation
▻http://news.mongabay.com/2015/0504-cao3-forest-monitoring-platform-launch.html
On Friday, the Carnegie Institution officially unveiled the latest upgrade of the Carnegie Airborne Observatory, an airplane equipped with technologies that enable scientists to conduct extremely high resolution scans of forest structure, biomass, and biological diversity. The platform has generated a wealth of information in places where it has been flown before, including surveying tree diversity across the Amazon, measuring forest carbon stocks in Panama and Madagascar, identifying critical wildlife habitats in Colombia, revealing massive tree die-offs in remote areas in Peru, mapping invasive plant species in Hawaii, and documenting previously unknown lion behavior in South Africa.
But the new plane is even better, according to Greg Asner, who conceived of and led development of the plane’s systems. The overhaul has doubled the plane’s sensing range and greatly expanded its capacity to collect and analyze data.
“The system produces maps that tell us more about an ecosystem in a single airborne overpass than what might be achieved in a lifetime of work on the ground. Our improved onboard computing, software integration, data capture, navigation, and ergonomics would make any #Silicon_Valley tech nerd drool,” wrote Asner in a blog post announcing the new plane. “Flight operations are streamlined and can be rapidly mobilized from California to anywhere on Earth.”
The carbon mapping process. In Peru, #CAO was used to measure deforestation and degradation by establishing a baseline for free Landsat imagery and forest cover monitoring software like as CLASlite, which was also developed by Asner’s team at Carnegie.
