Identifying deforestation quickly is key to mitigating forest loss around the world. We believe leveraging the availability of near-instantaneous satellite data can both help effectively monitor without being computationally intensive and be accessible to relevant stakeholders.
Temperate deciduous forest ecology research from the Forest Global Earth Observatory (ForestGEO) plot at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute. Projects included dendroband surveys, assessing plant responses to drought, and contributing to long-term ecological monitoring.
Eddy-covariance flux towers directly measure fluxes between the atmosphere and the planet, most notably carbon (CO2). The amount of carbon flux at any time is representative of phenology, or the timing of plants' life cycles. We are able to derive this phenology from satellites as well, but the exact correlation to the flux towers has been unknown (when using a lot of data). Our research aims to fix that.