Continental scale carbon stocks of individual trees in African drylands
- Visualizations by:
- Kel Elkins
- Produced by:
- Kathleen Gaeta
- View full credits
Using commercial, high-resolution satellite images and artificial intelligence, a team of NASA-funded scientists mapped almost 10 billion individual trees in Africa’s drylands in order to assess the amount of carbon stored outside of major forests. The result is the first comprehensive estimate of carbon density in the Saharan, Sahel, and Sudanian zones of Africa.
Complete transcript available.
The visualization begins with a view of the study region in northern Africa with climate zones indicated. The camera zooms into a region of satellite imagery and individual trees are identified, along with the amount of carbon stored in each tree. The camera then pulls out to reveal total tree carbon in the study region.
Credits
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio
Visualizers
- Kel Elkins (USRA) [Lead]
- Greg Shirah (NASA/GSFC)
Scientists
- Compton Tucker (NASA/GSFC)
- Jesse R. Meyer (SSAI)
- Martin Brandt (University of Copenhagen)
Producer
- Kathleen Gaeta (AIMM) [Lead]
Technical support
- Ian Jones (ADNET)
- Laurence Schuler (ADNET)
Series
This visualization can be found in the following series:Datasets used in this visualization
Landsat-8 Band Combination 4-3-2 (Collected with the OLI/TIRS sensor)
Terra and Aqua BMNG (A.K.A. Blue Marble: Next Generation) (Collected with the MODIS sensor)
Credit: The Blue Marble data is courtesy of Reto Stockli (NASA/GSFC).
Dataset can be found at: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/BlueMarble/
See more visualizations using this data setRasterized Tree Crowns (generated via ML from DigitalGlobe mosaics)
WorldView-2 © 2010 DigitalGlobe
Note: While we identify the data sets used in these visualizations, we do not store any further details nor the data sets themselves on our site.