More than one-third of land on Earth — that’s about three times the size of Russia, the largest country — has vegetation whose canopy reaches a height greater than 1 meter, or 3 feet. Vegetation with a canopy higher than 5 m (16 ft) occupies another area about twice the size of Russia. These are some of the highlights from a very-high-resolution (1-meter) map of canopy heights that can detect single trees at a global scale, in a development with massive implications for tracking biomass carbon storage. Tech giant Meta and nonprofit organization World Resources Institute used high-resolution satellite imagery and cutting-edge artificial intelligence technology to gather the data and develop an open-source model that can estimate canopy height from satellite images as well as aerial data. “We wanted to see how spatially granular we can get for canopy height data,” John Brandt, data science associate at WRI, told Mongabay in a video interview. “Our hope is to help in the monitoring of systems that aren’t well-served by forest structure data that currently exists in the Earth observation community.” Meta and WRI collaborated to produce a global map of canopy heights that can detect single trees at a global scale. Image courtesy of WRI and Meta. Mapping forests with the help of remote-sensing technology has made significant strides in recent years, especially with efforts to track and monitor deforestation around the world. However, detecting deforestation requires only relatively low-resolution imagery. That’s because deforestation typically occurs over larger areas and involves…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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