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[Bird sounds] Researcher: You hear it kind of chirping?

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Like a bird? Oh yeah -- got it.

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[bird and insect sounds]

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Fatoyinbo: So we're about to go do an airborne campaign called AfriSAR.

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And the goal of our campaign is to go and measure

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cosystem structure -- specifically forest structure forest height,

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forest carbon storage. We're really excited to be going to

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Gabon because as it turns out, Gabon is the second-most forested

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country in the world and they have some really dense tropical

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forests that has not really been studied, extensively, especially from a remote

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sensing perspective. So remote sensing is what we do when we use satellites

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sensing perspective So remote sensing is what we do when we use satellites or airborne instruments to explore our planet.

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So what's really exciting in Gabon is that they've been setting up all these

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field plots where they have very intensive measurements of

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forest structure of the species composition of a forest,

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of the age the forest, of how it's growing, and so now we can compare our airborne

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measurements with the measurements that they've been collecting in the field.

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Saatchi: My name is Sassan Saatchi and

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my role would be to collect some data on the ground

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to validate and verify what we observe

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with our instruments on the aircraft.

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This is one of our plots, it's one hectare. It goes

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100 meter this way and 100 meter that way. So in one hectare of the land.

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in the rainforest, you can find more than 400-500 different

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species, packed. So it's extremely interesting

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and it's hot

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and it's humid, and it's all the -- water is available

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sunshine is available, so it's one of those places in the world

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that life actually constantly regenerates in different forms.

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So it's very much interesting to go. And especially since it's

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connects so much to our climate and to the whole

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Earth system, and has one of the largest impacts on the Earth system,

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both in terms of its carbon, regulating weather and water

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So it's important for us to be there.

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Fatoyinbo: One of the questions that we're really interested in at NASA is we really want to

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be able to balance the global carbon budget. So we know

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much carbon is stored in the oceans, we know how much carbon is stored in the

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atmosphere, and we know how much is emitted through fossil fuel burning

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for example into the atmosphere, but we don't have a good idea of how

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much carbon is actually emitted into the atmosphere from forest fires

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and land use change. And we also don't really

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have a good estimate of how much carbon is being

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taken up from the atmosphere and where it is stored, because

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most of that carbon gets stored by forests. So what we're doing now by

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our AfriSAR campaign in Gabon is going to an ecosystem that is

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representative of a larger ecosystem in the Congo basin or tropical forests

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in general, and we're getting some really really, high-resolution, very accurate

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measurements of carbon.