These Trees
Are you basking in the shade of a favorite tree? Landsat helps us know how much of Earth is forest-covered and how it changes year-to year.
What Landsat Sees
So many of our favorite summer spots are forest-covered. This Landsat 8 image shows Mount Desert Island in Maine, home to Acadia National Park. Acadia is the oldest National Park east of the Mississippi, and one of the most visited parks in the US. Its rocky shorelines; bare, rounded summits; and idyllic forest trails beckon visitors year after year. Around the world Landsat helps managers map forests like this one and to understand whether or not they are changing.
Acadia National Park, Mt. Desert Island, Maine. Photo credit: Brigitte, Pixabay
Forests of Every Size
We understand a lot more about where on Earth forests grow and how forests are changing because of Landsat. Landsat helps map all kinds of forests, everything from boreal forests to tropical ones. In your summer travels, have you ever met a mangrove tree?
Photo Credit: Pat Josse, Pixabay
These mighty plants protect shorelines when storms create damaging waves, they capture carbon, and they provide a home for lots of aquatic animals—including many that are important parts of our food chain. Landsat satellites have helped create detailed global maps of where mangroves can be found. Landsat also helps us understand where mangrove forests are getting bigger and where they are disappearing.
Global distribution of mangrove forests mapped by Landsat.
Missing Trees
Cutting down forests for resources and farmland is a story as old as human civilization. Our modern appreciation of how intact forests help us—filtering water, capturing carbon, providing habitat—has made us realize that deforestation can be devastating. Landsat data lets us see the scope and impact of lost forests around the globe. The Landsat images here show an area of Cambodia where its Kampong Thom and Kampong Cham provinces meet. In the 15 years between the time when Landsat 7 collected the image on the left and Landsat 8 collected the image on the right, much of the region's forest has been turned into a regular grid of rubber plantations.
Landsat satellite data is used to map land cover in Brazil with a historical perspective, going back to 1984.
Figuring Out Forest Loss
Did you know that the Amazon is the world’s largest tropical rainforest? It is almost as big as the United States, from California all the way to Maine. But each year it gets smaller. Landsat satellites help us understand how fast the Amazon forest is shrinking.
The value of the Landsat archive is that we have a long-term memory of the changes that have occurred across the Amazon frontier.
— Doug Morton, Chief of the Biospheric Sciences Lab at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
In fact, until Landsat data came around, no one knew just how fast the Amazon was being deforested. A large NASA-funded project led by two scientists, named David Skole and Compton Tucker, used early Landsat data from 1978 and 1988 to measure the rate at which the Amazon was losing forest. In 1993, David and Compton published the most accurate Amazon-wide deforestation rates anyone had ever seen.
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Postcards from Camp Landsat
Whatever you do for summer fun, wherever you go to relax, Landsat is there. Landsat data helps people manage, protect, and preserve some of your favorite places on Earth.
Collect all nine postcards from Camp Landsat starting with Week 4: Forests Forever !
The adventure continues at Camp Landsat with lots of fun and fascinating Landsat facts and activities.
