TEDGlobal 2013
Greg Asner: Ecology from the air
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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.
Greg Asner - Airborne ecologist
Greg Asner’s mapping technology produces detailed, complex pictures of how humans’ activities affect our ecosystems. Full bio
Greg Asner’s mapping technology produces detailed, complex pictures of how humans’ activities affect our ecosystems. Full bio
Double-click the English transcript below to play the video.
00:12
Technology can change our understanding of nature.
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Take for example the case of lions.
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For centuries, it's been said that female lions
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do all of the hunting out in the open savanna,
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and male lions do nothing until it's time for dinner.
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You've heard this too, I can tell.
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Well recently, I led an airborne mapping campaign
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in the Kruger National Park in South Africa.
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Our colleagues put GPS tracking collars
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on male and female lions,
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and we mapped their hunting behavior
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from the air.
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The lower left shows a lion sizing up
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a herd of impala for a kill,
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and the right shows what I call
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the lion viewshed.
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That's how far the lion can see in all directions
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until his or her view is obstructed by vegetation.
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And what we found
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is that male lions are not the lazy hunters
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we thought them to be.
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They just use a different strategy.
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Whereas the female lions hunt
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out in the open savanna
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over long distances, usually during the day,
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male lions use an ambush strategy
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in dense vegetation, and often at night.
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This video shows the actual hunting viewsheds
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of male lions on the left
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and females on the right.
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Red and darker colors show more dense vegetation,
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and the white are wide open spaces.
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And this is the viewshed right literally at the eye level
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of hunting male and female lions.
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All of a sudden, you get a very clear understanding
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of the very spooky conditions under which
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male lions do their hunting.
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I bring up this example to begin,
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because it emphasizes how little
we know about nature.
we know about nature.
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There's been a huge amount of work done so far
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to try to slow down our losses of tropical forests,
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and we are losing our forests at a rapid rate,
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as shown in red on the slide.
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I find it ironic that we're doing so much,
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yet these areas are fairly unknown to science.
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So how can we save what we don't understand?
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Now I'm a global ecologist and an Earth explorer
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with a background in physics and chemistry
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and biology and a lot of other boring subjects,
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but above all, I'm obsessed with what we don't know
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about our planet.
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So I created this,
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the Carnegie Airborne Observatory, or CAO.
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It may look like a plane with a fancy paint job,
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but I packed it with over 1,000 kilos
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of high-tech sensors, computers,
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and a very motivated staff
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of Earth scientists and pilots.
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Two of our instruments are very unique:
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one is called an imaging spectrometer
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that can actually measure the chemical composition
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of plants as we fly over them.
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Another one is a set of lasers,
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very high-powered lasers,
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that fire out of the bottom of the plane,
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sweeping across the ecosystem
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and measuring it at nearly 500,000 times per second
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in high-resolution 3D.
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Here's an image of the Golden Gate Bridge
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in San Francisco, not far from where I live.
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Although we flew straight over this bridge,
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we imaged it in 3D, captured its color
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in just a few seconds.
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But the real power of the CAO
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is its ability to capture the actual building blocks
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of ecosystems.
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This is a small town in the Amazon,
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imaged with the CAO.
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We can slice through our data
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and see, for example, the 3D structure
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of the vegetation and the buildings,
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or we can use the chemical information
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to actually figure out how fast the plants are growing
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as we fly over them.
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The hottest pinks are the fastest-growing plants.
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And we can see biodiversity in ways
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that you never could have imagined.
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This is what a rainforest might look like
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as you fly over it in a hot air balloon.
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This is how we see a rainforest,
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in kaleidoscopic color that tells us
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that there are many species living with one another.
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But you have to remember that these trees
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are literally bigger than whales,
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and what that means is that
they're impossible to understand
they're impossible to understand
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just by walking on the ground below them.
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So our imagery is 3D, it's chemical, it's biological,
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and this tells us not only the species
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that are living in the canopy,
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but it tells us a lot of information
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about the rest of the species
that occupy the rainforest.
that occupy the rainforest.
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Now I created the CAO
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in order to answer questions that have proven
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extremely challenging to answer
from any other vantage point,
from any other vantage point,
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such as from the ground, or from satellite sensors.
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I want to share three of those
questions with you today.
questions with you today.
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The first questions is,
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how do we manage our carbon reserves
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in tropical forests?
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Tropical forests contain a huge
amount of carbon in the trees,
amount of carbon in the trees,
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and we need to keep that carbon in those forests
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if we're going to avoid any further global warming.
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Unfortunately, global carbon emissions
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from deforestation
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now equals the global transportation sector.
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That's all ships, airplanes, trains
and automobiles combined.
and automobiles combined.
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So it's understandable that policy negotiators
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have been working hard to reduce deforestation,
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but they're doing it on landscapes
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that are hardly known to science.
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If you don't know where the carbon is exactly,
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in detail, how can you know what you're losing?
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Basically, we need a high-tech accounting system.
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With our system, we're able to see the carbon stocks
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of tropical forests in utter detail.
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The red shows, obviously,
closed-canopy tropical forest,
closed-canopy tropical forest,
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and then you see the cookie cutting,
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or the cutting of the forest in yellows and greens.
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It's like cutting a cake except this cake
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is about whale deep.
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And yet, we can zoom in and see the forest
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and the trees at the same time.
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And what's amazing is, even though we flew
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very high above this forest,
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later on in analysis, we can go in
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and actually experience the treetrops,
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leaf by leaf, branch by branch,
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just as the other species that live in this forest
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experience it along with the trees themselves.
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We've been using the technology to explore
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and to actually put out the first carbon geographies
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in high resolution
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in faraway places like the Amazon Basin
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and not-so-faraway places like the United States
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and Central America.
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What I'm going to do is I'm going to take you
on a high-resolution, first-time tour
on a high-resolution, first-time tour
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of the carbon landscapes of Peru and then Panama.
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The colors are going to be going from red to blue.
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Red is extremely high carbon stocks,
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your largest cathedral forests you can imagine,
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and blue are very low carbon stocks.
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And let me tell you, Peru alone is an amazing place,
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totally unknown in terms of its carbon geography
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until today.
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We can fly to this area in northern Peru
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and see super high carbon stocks in red,
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and the Amazon River and floodplain
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cutting right through it.
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We can go to an area of utter devastation
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caused by deforestation in blue,
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and the virus of deforestation
spreading out in orange.
spreading out in orange.
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We can also fly to the southern Andes
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to see the tree line and see exactly how
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the carbon geography ends
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as we go up into the mountain system.
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And we can go to the biggest swamp
in the western Amazon.
in the western Amazon.
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It's a watery dreamworld
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akin to Jim Cameron's "Avatar."
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We can go to one of the smallest tropical countries,
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Panama, and see also a huge range
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of carbon variation,
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from high in red to low in blue.
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Unfortunately, most of the carbon
is lost in the lowlands,
is lost in the lowlands,
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but what you see that's left,
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in terms of high carbon stocks in greens and reds,
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is the stuff that's up in the mountains.
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One interesting exception to this
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is right in the middle of your screen.
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You're seeing the buffer zone
around the Panama Canal.
around the Panama Canal.
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That's in the reds and yellows.
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The canal authorities are using force
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to protect their watershed and global commerce.
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This kind of carbon mapping
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has transformed conservation
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and resource policy development.
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It's really advancing our ability to save forests
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and to curb climate change.
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My second question: How do we
prepare for climate change
prepare for climate change
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in a place like the Amazon rainforest?
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Let me tell you, I spend a lot of time
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in these places, and we're seeing
the climate changing already.
the climate changing already.
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Temperatures are increasing,
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and what's really happening is
we're getting a lot of droughts,
we're getting a lot of droughts,
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recurring droughts.
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The 2010 mega-drought is shown here
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with red showing an area
about the size of Western Europe.
about the size of Western Europe.
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The Amazon was so dry in 2010
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that even the main stem of the Amazon river itself
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dried up partially, as you see in the photo
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in the lower portion of the slide.
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What we found is that in very remote areas,
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these droughts are having a big negative impact
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on tropical forests.
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For example, these are all of the dead trees in red
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that suffered mortality following the 2010 drought.
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This area happens to be on the border
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of Peru and Brazil,
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totally unexplored,
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almost totally unknown scientifically.
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So what we think, as Earth scientists,
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is species are going to have to migrate
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with climate change from the east in Brazil
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all the way west into the Andes
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and up into the mountains
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in order to minimize their
exposure to climate change.
exposure to climate change.
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One of the problems with this is that humans
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are taking apart the western Amazon as we speak.
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Look at this 100-square-kilometer gash
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in the forest created by gold miners.
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You see the forest in green in 3D,
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and you see the effects of gold mining
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down below the soil surface.
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Species have nowhere to migrate
in a system like this, obviously.
in a system like this, obviously.
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If you haven't been to the Amazon, you should go.
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It's an amazing experience every time,
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no matter where you go.
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You're going to probably see it this way, on a river.
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But what happens is a lot of times
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the rivers hide what's really going on
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back in the forest itself.
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We flew over this same river,
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imaged the system in 3D.
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The forest is on the left.
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And then we can digitally remove the forest
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and see what's going on below the canopy.
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And in this case, we found gold mining activity,
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all of it illegal,
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set back away from the river's edge,
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as you'll see in those strange pockmarks
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coming up on your screen on the right.
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Don't worry, we're working with the authorities
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to deal with this and many, many other problems
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in the region.
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So in order to put together a conservation plan
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for these unique, important corridors
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like the western Amazon
and the Andes Amazon corridor,
and the Andes Amazon corridor,
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we have to start making
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geographically explicit plans now.
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How do we do that if we don't know
the geography of biodiversity in the region,
the geography of biodiversity in the region,
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if it's so unknown to science?
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So what we've been doing is using
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the laser-guided spectroscopy from the CAO
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to map for the first time the biodiversity
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of the Amazon rainforest.
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Here you see actual data showing
different species in different colors.
different species in different colors.
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Reds are one type of species, blues are another,
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and greens are yet another.
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And when we take this together and scale up
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to the regional level,
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we get a completely new geography
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of biodiversity unknown prior to this work.
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This tells us where the big biodiversity changes
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occur from habitat to habitat,
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and that's really important because it tells us
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a lot about where species may migrate to
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and migrate from as the climate shifts.
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And this is the pivotal information that's needed
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by decision makers to develop protected areas
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in the context of their regional development plans.
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And third and final question is,
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how do we manage biodiversity on a planet
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of protected ecosystems?
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The example I started out
with about lions hunting,
with about lions hunting,
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that was a study we did
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behind the fence line of a protected area
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in South Africa.
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And the truth is, much of Africa's nature
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is going to persist into the future
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in protected areas like I show in blue on the screen.
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This puts incredible pressure and responsibility
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on park management.
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They need to do and make decisions
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that will benefit all of the species
that they're protecting.
that they're protecting.
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Some of their decisions have really big impacts.
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For example, how much and where
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to use fire as a management tool?
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Or, how to deal with a large species like elephants,
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which may, if their populations get too large,
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have a negative impact on the ecosystem
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and on other species.
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And let me tell you, these types of dynamics
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really play out on the landscape.
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In the foreground is an area with lots of fire
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and lots of elephants:
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wide open savanna in blue, and just a few trees.
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As we cross this fence line, now we're getting
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into an area that has had protection from fire
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and zero elephants:
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dense vegetation, a radically different ecosystem.
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And in a place like Kruger,
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the soaring elephant densities
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are a real problem.
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I know it's a sensitive issue for many of you,
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and there are no easy answers with this.
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But what's good is that
the technology we've developed
the technology we've developed
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and we're working with in South Africa, for example,
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is allowing us to map every
single tree in the savanna,
single tree in the savanna,
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and then through repeat flights
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we're able to see which trees
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are being pushed over by elephants,
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in the red as you see on the screen,
and how much that's happening
and how much that's happening
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in different types of landscapes in the savanna.
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That's giving park managers
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a very first opportunity to use
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tactical management strategies
that are more nuanced
that are more nuanced
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and don't lead to those extremes
that I just showed you.
that I just showed you.
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So really, the way we're looking
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at protected areas nowadays
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is to think of it as tending to a circle of life,
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where we have fire management,
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elephant management, those impacts on
the structure of the ecosystem,
the structure of the ecosystem,
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and then those impacts
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affecting everything from insects
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up to apex predators like lions.
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Going forward, I plan to greatly expand
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the airborne observatory.
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I'm hoping to actually put the technology into orbit
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so we can manage the entire planet
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with technologies like this.
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Until then, you're going to find me flying
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in some remote place that you've never heard of.
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I just want to end by saying that technology is
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absolutely critical to managing our planet,
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but even more important is the understanding
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and wisdom to apply it.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Greg Asner - Airborne ecologistGreg Asner’s mapping technology produces detailed, complex pictures of how humans’ activities affect our ecosystems.
Why you should listen
The remote sensing techniques developed by Greg Asner and his team are viewed as among the most advanced in the world for exploring Earth’s changing ecosystems in unprecedented detail and richness. Using airborne and satellite technologies such as laser scanning and hyperspectral imaging, combined with field work and computer modeling, Asner measures and qualifies humans’ impact on regions from the American Southwest to the Brazilian Amazon.
“We’re able to see, if you will, the forest and the trees at the same time,” Asner says. “We’re able to now understand an image, map and measure huge expanses of the environment while maintaining the detail. Not just the spatial resolution, but the biological resolution—the actual organisms that live in these places.” For Asner, who is on the faculty at the Carnegie Institution and Stanford and leads the Carnegie Airborne Observatory project, this is science with a mission: to influence climate change treaties and save the forests he studies.
Greg Asner | Speaker | TED.com