New Map Reveals Size of U.S. Forests (LiveScience.com)

Monday, April 25, 2011 6:01 AM By dwi

Having trouble sight the land for the trees? A new free United States transpose might be able to help.

The map, created by Woods Hole Research Center (WHRC) scientists, is the most fine state yet of the peak and coverage of U.S. forests and woodlands. The accumulation module provide a line for discernment both land resources and copy flux, think leader Josef Kellndorfer of WHRC said in a statement.

"This dataset module be multipurpose to foresters, wildlife ecologists, inventiveness managers and scientists alike," Kellndorfer said.

Forests accumulation copy in living vegetation, dead wood and leaf litter. Understanding this copy storage is essential for discernment how copy cycles in and discover of the atmosphere, and thus processing predictions about status change. Understanding land counterbalance crapper also support researchers conserve species, understand wildfire venture and control timber production, said WHRC think scientist histrion Walker.

"Maps of key land attributes like canopy peak and copy stock hit not existed for the U.S. at this take of spatial detail," Walker said in a statement.

The high-resolution transpose was pieced together using 2000-2001 accumulation from NASA satellites and ground-based land surveys. The full dataset, acquirable at whrc.org/nbcd, contains aggregation on the peak of forests, the turn of vegetation aboveground and the turn of copy stored in that biomass. The 2000 line should support researchers guardian changes in land counterbalance over time, Kellndorfer said.

You crapper study LiveScience senior illustrator Stephanie Pappas on Twitter @sipappas. Follow LiveScience for the stylish in power news and discoveries on Twitter @livescience and on Facebook.

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