A recent article in Yale Environment 360, by Rhett Butler, introduces a new imaging system, the AToMS (or Airborne Taxonomic Mapping System), first tested this summer above the Amazon rainforest in Peru, which has a great potential to revolutionize forest research and could play a key role in forest preservation across the world. The system produces three-dimensional pictures of forests, showing among other things the species they contain and the amount of carbon they hold. The AToMS creates images by deploying a pair of lasers that send 400,000 pulses per second towards the ground as well as an imaging spectrometer that is able to show the chemical and light reflecting properties of individual trees; all this at incredible speed. The system thus can provide vast amount of information of previously unexplored forests.
In addition, Rhett points out, Google Earth (introduced in 2005) has also been increasingly used for forest monitoring. First utilized for monitoring purposes by Rebecca Moore, a Google employee, to monitor logging around her hometown in California, Google Earth technology is now widely employed by scientists for their research and for communication with the public. The software can be downloaded for free from Google.
Below are some spectacular images produced by AToMS.
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| Source: Yale Environment 360 |
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