News Home

Video Laser vision reveals Queensland forests in new detail

Elise Worthington

International scientists have converged on a Brisbane forest to test the ability of new laser technology to measure vegetation and help calculate carbon absorption.


MATT WORDSWORTH: The forests around Brisbane have been crawling with scientists recently. They've converged from around the world to test out the latest laser technology. It allows them to measure the forest in minute detail and, as Elise Worthington reports that has big implications for the fight against climate change.


ELISE WORTHINGTON: They look more like art than science but these ethereal images serve a very down to earth purpose.

DR GLEN NEWNHAM, CSIRO: These sorts of instruments record forests in much more detail than we have ever been able to do before.


ELISE WORTHINGTON: The result of the latest advances in laser technology these pictures allow scientists to accurately measure the size and health of forests and individual trees.

PROFESSOR STUART PHINN, ASSOCIATE SCIENCE DIRECTOR TERN: You get much more precise detailed measurements of vegetation structure than you could do using traditional ground based methods using people.

ELISE WORTHINGTON: And the new equipment is drawing a very specialised crowd to Karawatha Forest on Brisbane's outskirts where researchers from the UK and The US have joined their Australian counterparts to test out their toys.


ELISE WORTHINGTON: But the main attraction lies within this black box a joint project involving Boston University and the CSIRO. The one and a half million dollar laser is an upgrade on an earlier model that allows scientists to record detail right down to leaf level. And it has a very Australian nickname.


PROFESSOR ALAN STRAHLER, BOSTON UNIVERSITY: In a way it's a kind of echidna 2 or a super echidna what have you because of the addition of the second wave length and two pulses, in fact two colours really of information is what's so valuable.

ELISE WORTHINGTON: Some things, like collecting leaves from the top of canopies still have to be done the old fashioned way.


ELISE WORTHINGTON: But now laptops measure and analyse the laser data on site.


RESEARCHERS: This is T equals zero here and this is the outgoing pulse

PROFESSOR ALAN STRAHLER: They give you the opportunity to measure the forest structure very precisely and that opens a lot of doors but it doesn't mean the work is necessarily any easier; it just raises new questions and lets us ask exciting questions we haven't been able to answer before.

ELISE WORTHINGTON: A key challenge for companies and countries seeking to offset emissions as the planet warms is to calculate how much co2 different forests absorb. And the old gear simply didn't measure up.

DR GLEN NEWNHAM: That wasn't adequate enough to place a value on forests in terms of their carbon sequestration and the amount of carbon that they were storing. We have these much more detailed measurements now and they're much more adequate to place that value in terms of the carbon storage in forests.


ELISE WORTHINGTON: And the Three dimensional images can be matched with daily satellite data for a bigger picture.

PROFESSOR STUART PHINN: One way of measuring how much vegetation is producing a map from a satellite image and the collaborative work that we're doing here is allowing us to measure vegetation more accurately on the ground.

ELISE WORTHINGTON: Revealing our forests in a whole new light a prospect that unites this all-star international line-up.

PROFESSOR STUART PHINN: It's very rare to get the best scientists together in the world to work on a collaborative project like this. Bringing these people together is critical because everyone has a different solution you put those together and you get the best solution in this case for improved environmental monitoring.

7.30 Queensland