Lasers measure tropical forests changes

U.S. scientists say they are using airborne lasers and other new technology to quantify landscape-scale changes occurring to Hawaiian forests.

The U.S. Forest Service and Carnegie Institution of Washington scientists said they hope their findings will help other researchers racing to assess threats to tropical forests around the world.

Our results clearly show the interactive role that climate and invasive species play on carbon stocks in tropical forests, and this may prove useful in projecting future changes in carbon sequestration in Hawaii and beyond, said Gregory Asner of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology.

The researchers said airborne technology might be the best way to examine quickly rugged ecosystems covered with dense vegetation that make them difficult to study on the ground or with satellites.

These findings showed airborne data correlated with data derived from study plots on the ground, said Flint Hughes, a Forest Service ecosystem ecologist and one of the study’s authors.

Hughes and his colleagues compared field measurements with data derived from the Carnegie Airborne Observatory, a system that uses a combination of lasers capable of measuring elevation to within 6 inches, GPS and advanced imaging spectrometers that can identify plant species from aircraft.

They report the research in the journal Ecosystems.