Earth Equity News

Towering Northwest Forests Stand Out in Global Map. By Joe Rojas-Burke, Oregonian, July 23, 2010. "Nowhere on Earth can you find forests as tall and vast as those in the Pacific Northwest. They make Canada's great boreal forests look like shrubs. Amazon rain forest trees are mere halflings by comparison... That's strikingly clear in the first global-scale map charting the heights of the world's forests. Michael Lefsky, a former Oregon State University scientist now at Colorado State University, devised a way to combine millions of observations from NASA satellites to map tree heights around the planet. Beyond bragging rights, the mapping effort gives scientists an important tool to track how the world's forests draw in carbon dioxide and influence the rate of global warming. While the first map is a rough draft, it shows the potential for making accurate global measurements of forest growth. 'This is a very impressive technical accomplishment,' says forest ecologist Stephen Mitchell, a postdoctoral researcher at Duke University. Only a tiny fraction of the earth's land mass gives rise to tall forests. In northern California, small patches of coast redwoods exceed 200 feet and from British Columbia to Oregon, rain-drenched stands of Douglas fir and Sitka spruce routinely reach 130 feet or more. Forests along the southern rim of the Himalayas come close, as do forests in Laos, Malaysia and Indonesia. In the Amazon, average heights of forest stands seldom exceed 70 feet. In the huge tracts of boreal forest across North America and Eurasia, trees are lucky to reach 50 feet."