News
Harvesting virtual forests
Forests store more carbon than any other above-ground ecosystem on the planet. Just how much, though, is hard to know without cutting them down. Enter ‘virtual harvesting’, a non-destructive remote sensing technique for accurately measuring biomass that has just been undertaken at TERN’s tropical forest observing sites.
Tracking Australia’s, and indeed the international community’s, progress towards meeting major global environmental agreements and targets, such as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and The Paris Agreement, requires detailed accounts of carbon stocks and how they’re changing over time.
“We know that forest ecosystems contain more carbon biomass than any other above-ground ecosystem on the planet,” says Wageningen Graduate Dr Kim Calders of Belgium’s Ghent University to TERN newsletter.