Kind: captions
Language: en
just thinking that i get to
go into the forest and shoot lasers at
trees and is
mind-blowing i grew up in
benin and west africa my parents
worked for an international organization
i moved around a lot
and there were many times where i would
be driving down a street and there would
be lots of big trees and come back you
know a few weeks or months
or years later and a lot of those big
trees were no longer there and that
would really
break my heart growing up it was just
always really clear to me that there is
direct connection
between human well-being and
the quality of the environment around
you
lola fatambo is now research scientist
at nasa's goddard space flight center
[Music]
she and her team are about to see the
century old tree she loves
in a new life
i'm going on a hike through a forest i
have a tendency to look up and say
okay oh that tree's about 60 feet tall
and then i try to calculate in my head
okay
how much carbon is stored in that tree
there's carbon all around us
generally speaking when we're looking at
trees about half of that
weight is carbon lola and her team
want to know how much carbon is stored
in this entire forest
to measure each and every tree they're
using a special kind of tool
lasers we're using a terrestrial laser
scanner
that shoots out billions of laser pulses
every second
and then measures the distance from the
instrument to
whatever is around it the data that we
get back we call it a point cloud
billions of data points form a 3d
measurement
of forest volume and the carbon stored
within it's such a dense point cloud
that it actually looks like
an image you know almost like science
fiction
this scan may look like reality but it's
data
revealing that in the area the size of a
football field these trees are storing
roughly 150 metric tons of carbon
all pulled out of thin air but to get a
global view of
how much carbon forests are storing lola
needs to look from space enter
the international space station this is
about the size
of a fridge with the same laser
technology
used by your terrestrial scanners while
we can get a 3d measure of forest carbon
you can see the laser shooting down out
of the bottom of the instrument
towards the surface of the planet
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we actually can see a full profile of
plant materials
the game changer here is that this is
going to be for the first time
a near global data set so the fact that
it's on the international space station
means that
it is collecting data everywhere where
the space station is flying
and that means that we're getting data
almost everywhere on earth
this research will give insight on the
carbon new forest could store
as well as locate old forests that are
holding lots of carbon that lola
believes
we must preserve and not just because
they store carbon there are so many
things about forests that are amazing
forests are really important for our
water supply
forests protect us from heat forests
breathe in some ways just like we do
when you lose a lot of the ecosystem
services that forests provide
that has a direct impact on the
well-being
of people one of my hopes and the type
of work that i do
is that my work will not only have a
scientific contribution
but will also have a societal impact
you