Do We Have More Forests Than We Thought?

Deforestation is one of the principal concerns of environmentalists right now. The devastation being wrought on such vegetation strongholds as the Amazon Rainforest has been so well-documented over the last decade that it’s in danger of becoming irrelevant by its omnipresence.

Fortunately, however, a new study has uncovered some positive news, for a change. Published in the academic journal Science, the report has revealed that there are almost 500 million hectares more forested area on the planet’s surface than previously thought. The researchers achieved this by using hi-resolution satellite images of previously unexplored parts of the globe, known as drylands.

Drylands: the undiscovered frontier?

Though they comprise a whopping 40% of the Earth’s surface, drylands are one of the least explored types of terrain on the planet. As the name suggests, these areas contain very little moisture and were previously only mapped out via low-resolution satellite images.

Because these images were incapable of giving a clear view of the area, it was often impossible for scientists to discern whether they showed dirt, trees or mere shadows, and as a result were frequently written off as containing no forestry at all.

However, that has been found to be false by this latest study. A concerted effort from scientists in 13 different countries, including such far-flung places as Kyrgyzstan, Niger and Argentina, has revealed that there are between 40% and 47% more trees in dryland biomes than previously thought.

A second Amazon?

The team reached this conclusion by painstakingly poring over 210,000 Google Earth images of 0.5 hectare plots of land. The hi-resolution images delivered by the internet giant are capable of equating each pixel to less than half a metre of terrain, as opposed to the tens of metres previously used by older images.

The new images show that are 1079 million hectares of forested area in drylands, while there are 1,327 million hectares of land with more than 10% of foliage cover. This translated to 467 million hectares of previously undiscovered forest, pushing up global totals by 9%.

Though the Amazon itself may still be in danger, the newly discovered terrain accounts for almost two-thirds of its total size. As a result, we now have almost enough forested areas for a second Amazon Rainforest, which is most certainly encouraging news at a time when it’s sorely needed.

Planning for the future

The discovery is very important in getting our sums right when it comes to global warming. Previous estimates of how much carbon dioxide (CO2) the Earth could handle neglected these areas entirely, but since trees are adept at converting CO2 into oxygen, this could mean that we can rely on fossil fuels for longer than previously anticipated.

Of course, CO2 isn’t the only greenhouse gas (GHG) responsible for raising global temperatures. One of the chief culprits are the methane emissions from agriculture and dairy farming, a gas which is believed to have a 25-times greater effect on climate change than CO2 over a 100-year period.

However, the discovery still represents a positive step forward for environmentalists and scientists the world over. Now, they are faced with the task of conserving this newly-found lung so that it doesn’t fall prey to the same fate as similarly forested areas around the globe.