ABSTRACT

It has proven challenging to determine the carbon content of dryland trees outside of forests with satellite data because trees are discrete and small. We overcame this by using 326,000 sub-meter commercial satellite images to map individual tree crowns in African drylands at the 50 cm scale, mapping 10 billion tree crowns over 10 million km2 using high performance computing and machine learning. We then used allometry to convert tree crowns into leaf, root, and wood carbon at the tree level. We developed a viewer to utilize our 10 B tree carbon inventory, from tree(1) to tree(10 B) with a carbon uncertainty of +/-20%. The presenter will describe how this was achieved and the implications of this work. This work appeared in the March 2, 2023 issue of Nature.

About the Speaker:

Compton Tucker, a native of Carlsbad New Mexico, came to NASA/Goddard as a post-doctoral fellow in late 1975 after receiving his Ph.D. degree from Colorado State University and in 1977 became an employee of NASA. At NASA/Goddard, Tucker has used satellite data to study the Earth, in research areas that include famine early warning, deforestation, ecologically-coupled diseases, food security, and the carbon cycle. Since 2015, he has devoted most of his time complimenting NASA satellite observations with commercial satellite data. He took part from 2002 to 2012 in NASA's Space Archaeology Program, leading a group that assisted archaeologists mapping ancient sites with ground-penetrating radar and magnetometry in Turkey, at the sites of Troy of Trojan War fame, in the Granicus River Valley, and at Gordion, the home of King Midas. He considers coming to GSFC one of the best decisions he has made.