Ecology from the air

What are our forests really made of? From the air, ecologist Greg Asner uses a spectrometer and high-powered lasers to map nature in meticulous kaleidoscopic 3D detail -- what he calls “a very high-tech accounting system” of carbon. In this fascinating talk, Asner gives a clear message: To save our ecosystems, we need more data, gathered in new ways.

Technology can change our understanding of nature.

Take for example the case of lions.

For centuries, it's been said that female lions

do all of the hunting out in the open savanna,

and male lions do nothing until it's time for dinner.

You've heard this too, I can tell.

Well recently, I led an airborne mapping campaign

in the Kruger National Park in South Africa.

Our colleagues put GPS tracking collars

on male and female lions,

and we mapped their hunting behavior

from the air.

The lower left shows a lion sizing up

a herd of impala for a kill,

and the right shows what I call

the lion viewshed.

That's how far the lion can see in all directions

until his or her view is obstructed by vegetation.

And what we found

is that male lions are not the lazy hunters

we thought them to be.

They just use a different strategy.

Whereas the female lions hunt

out in the open savanna

over long distances, usually during the day,

male lions use an ambush strategy

in dense vegetation, and often at night.

This video shows the actual hunting viewsheds

of male lions on the left

and females on the right.

Red and darker colors show more dense vegetation,

and the white are wide open spaces.

And this is the viewshed right literally at the eye level

of hunting male and female lions.

All of a sudden, you get a very clear understanding

of the very spooky conditions under which

male lions do their hunting.

I bring up this example to begin,

because it emphasizes how little
we know about nature.

There's been a huge amount of work done so far

to try to slow down our losses of tropical forests,

and we are losing our forests at a rapid rate,

as shown in red on the slide.

I find it ironic that we're doing so much,

yet these areas are fairly unknown to science.

So how can we save what we don't understand?

Now I'm a global ecologist and an Earth explorer

with a background in physics and chemistry

and biology and a lot of other boring subjects,

but above all, I'm obsessed with what we don't know

about our planet.

So I created this,

the Carnegie Airborne Observatory, or CAO.

It may look like a plane with a fancy paint job,

but I packed it with over 1,000 kilos

of high-tech sensors, computers,

and a very motivated staff

of Earth scientists and pilots.

Two of our instruments are very unique:

one is called an imaging spectrometer

that can actually measure the chemical composition

of plants as we fly over them.

Another one is a set of lasers,

very high-powered lasers,

that fire out of the bottom of the plane,

sweeping across the ecosystem

and measuring it at nearly 500,000 times per second

in high-resolution 3D.

Here's an image of the Golden Gate Bridge

in San Francisco, not far from where I live.

Although we flew straight over this bridge,

we imaged it in 3D, captured its color

in just a few seconds.

But the real power of the CAO

is its ability to capture the actual building blocks

of ecosystems.

This is a small town in the Amazon,

imaged with the CAO.

We can slice through our data

and see, for example, the 3D structure

of the vegetation and the buildings,

or we can use the chemical information

to actually figure out how fast the plants are growing

as we fly over them.

The hottest pinks are the fastest-growing plants.

And we can see biodiversity in ways

that you never could have imagined.

This is what a rainforest might look like

as you fly over it in a hot air balloon.

This is how we see a rainforest,

in kaleidoscopic color that tells us

that there are many species living with one another.

But you have to remember that these trees

are literally bigger than whales,

and what that means is that
they're impossible to understand

just by walking on the ground below them.

So our imagery is 3D, it's chemical, it's biological,

and this tells us not only the species

that are living in the canopy,

but it tells us a lot of information

about the rest of the species
that occupy the rainforest.

Now I created the CAO

in order to answer questions that have proven

extremely challenging to answer
from any other vantage point,

such as from the ground, or from satellite sensors.

I want to share three of those
questions with you today.

The first questions is,

how do we manage our carbon reserves

in tropical forests?

Tropical forests contain a huge
amount of carbon in the trees,

and we need to keep that carbon in those forests

if we're going to avoid any further global warming.

Unfortunately, global carbon emissions

from deforestation

now equals the global transportation sector.

That's all ships, airplanes, trains
and automobiles combined.

So it's understandable that policy negotiators

have been working hard to reduce deforestation,

but they're doing it on landscapes

that are hardly known to science.

If you don't know where the carbon is exactly,

in detail, how can you know what you're losing?

Basically, we need a high-tech accounting system.

With our system, we're able to see the carbon stocks

of tropical forests in utter detail.

The red shows, obviously,
closed-canopy tropical forest,

and then you see the cookie cutting,

or the cutting of the forest in yellows and greens.

It's like cutting a cake except this cake

is about whale deep.

And yet, we can zoom in and see the forest

and the trees at the same time.

And what's amazing is, even though we flew

very high above this forest,

later on in analysis, we can go in

and actually experience the treetrops,

leaf by leaf, branch by branch,

just as the other species that live in this forest

experience it along with the trees themselves.

We've been using the technology to explore

and to actually put out the first carbon geographies

in high resolution

in faraway places like the Amazon Basin

and not-so-faraway places like the United States

and Central America.

What I'm going to do is I'm going to take you
on a high-resolution, first-time tour

of the carbon landscapes of Peru and then Panama.

The colors are going to be going from red to blue.

Red is extremely high carbon stocks,

your largest cathedral forests you can imagine,

and blue are very low carbon stocks.

And let me tell you, Peru alone is an amazing place,

totally unknown in terms of its carbon geography

until today.

We can fly to this area in northern Peru

and see super high carbon stocks in red,

and the Amazon River and floodplain

cutting right through it.

We can go to an area of utter devastation

caused by deforestation in blue,

and the virus of deforestation
spreading out in orange.

We can also fly to the southern Andes

to see the tree line and see exactly how

the carbon geography ends

as we go up into the mountain system.

And we can go to the biggest swamp
in the western Amazon.

It's a watery dreamworld

akin to Jim Cameron's "Avatar."

We can go to one of the smallest tropical countries,

Panama, and see also a huge range

of carbon variation,

from high in red to low in blue.

Unfortunately, most of the carbon
is lost in the lowlands,

but what you see that's left,

in terms of high carbon stocks in greens and reds,

is the stuff that's up in the mountains.

One interesting exception to this

is right in the middle of your screen.

You're seeing the buffer zone
around the Panama Canal.

That's in the reds and yellows.

The canal authorities are using force

to protect their watershed and global commerce.

This kind of carbon mapping

has transformed conservation

and resource policy development.

It's really advancing our ability to save forests

and to curb climate change.

My second question: How do we
prepare for climate change

in a place like the Amazon rainforest?

Let me tell you, I spend a lot of time

in these places, and we're seeing
the climate changing already.

Temperatures are increasing,

and what's really happening is
we're getting a lot of droughts,

recurring droughts.

The 2010 mega-drought is shown here

with red showing an area
about the size of Western Europe.

The Amazon was so dry in 2010

that even the main stem of the Amazon river itself

dried up partially, as you see in the photo

in the lower portion of the slide.

What we found is that in very remote areas,

these droughts are having a big negative impact

on tropical forests.

For example, these are all of the dead trees in red

that suffered mortality following the 2010 drought.

This area happens to be on the border

of Peru and Brazil,

totally unexplored,

almost totally unknown scientifically.

So what we think, as Earth scientists,

is species are going to have to migrate

with climate change from the east in Brazil

all the way west into the Andes

and up into the mountains

in order to minimize their
exposure to climate change.

One of the problems with this is that humans

are taking apart the western Amazon as we speak.

Look at this 100-square-kilometer gash

in the forest created by gold miners.

You see the forest in green in 3D,

and you see the effects of gold mining

down below the soil surface.

Species have nowhere to migrate
in a system like this, obviously.

If you haven't been to the Amazon, you should go.

It's an amazing experience every time,

no matter where you go.

You're going to probably see it this way, on a river.

But what happens is a lot of times

the rivers hide what's really going on

back in the forest itself.

We flew over this same river,

imaged the system in 3D.

The forest is on the left.

And then we can digitally remove the forest

and see what's going on below the canopy.

And in this case, we found gold mining activity,

all of it illegal,

set back away from the river's edge,

as you'll see in those strange pockmarks

coming up on your screen on the right.

Don't worry, we're working with the authorities

to deal with this and many, many other problems

in the region.

So in order to put together a conservation plan

for these unique, important corridors

like the western Amazon
and the Andes Amazon corridor,

we have to start making

geographically explicit plans now.

How do we do that if we don't know
the geography of biodiversity in the region,

if it's so unknown to science?

So what we've been doing is using

the laser-guided spectroscopy from the CAO

to map for the first time the biodiversity

of the Amazon rainforest.

Here you see actual data showing
different species in different colors.

Reds are one type of species, blues are another,

and greens are yet another.

And when we take this together and scale up

to the regional level,

we get a completely new geography

of biodiversity unknown prior to this work.

This tells us where the big biodiversity changes

occur from habitat to habitat,

and that's really important because it tells us

a lot about where species may migrate to

and migrate from as the climate shifts.

And this is the pivotal information that's needed

by decision makers to develop protected areas

in the context of their regional development plans.

And third and final question is,

how do we manage biodiversity on a planet

of protected ecosystems?

The example I started out
with about lions hunting,

that was a study we did

behind the fence line of a protected area

in South Africa.

And the truth is, much of Africa's nature

is going to persist into the future

in protected areas like I show in blue on the screen.

This puts incredible pressure and responsibility

on park management.

They need to do and make decisions

that will benefit all of the species
that they're protecting.

Some of their decisions have really big impacts.

For example, how much and where

to use fire as a management tool?

Or, how to deal with a large species like elephants,

which may, if their populations get too large,

have a negative impact on the ecosystem

and on other species.

And let me tell you, these types of dynamics

really play out on the landscape.

In the foreground is an area with lots of fire

and lots of elephants:

wide open savanna in blue, and just a few trees.

As we cross this fence line, now we're getting

into an area that has had protection from fire

and zero elephants:

dense vegetation, a radically different ecosystem.

And in a place like Kruger,

the soaring elephant densities

are a real problem.

I know it's a sensitive issue for many of you,

and there are no easy answers with this.

But what's good is that
the technology we've developed

and we're working with in South Africa, for example,

is allowing us to map every
single tree in the savanna,

and then through repeat flights

we're able to see which trees

are being pushed over by elephants,

in the red as you see on the screen,
and how much that's happening

in different types of landscapes in the savanna.

That's giving park managers

a very first opportunity to use

tactical management strategies
that are more nuanced

and don't lead to those extremes
that I just showed you.

So really, the way we're looking

at protected areas nowadays

is to think of it as tending to a circle of life,

where we have fire management,

elephant management, those impacts on
the structure of the ecosystem,

and then those impacts

affecting everything from insects

up to apex predators like lions.

Going forward, I plan to greatly expand

the airborne observatory.

I'm hoping to actually put the technology into orbit

so we can manage the entire planet

with technologies like this.

Until then, you're going to find me flying

in some remote place that you've never heard of.

I just want to end by saying that technology is

absolutely critical to managing our planet,

but even more important is the understanding

and wisdom to apply it.

Thank you.

(Applause)