From space, parts of the Amazon rainforest that have previously been logged or burned may look fully recovered with a healthy, lush, and green canopy.
From space, parts of the Amazon rainforest that have previously been logged or burned may look fully recovered with a healthy, lush, and green canopy. They may seem to be places buzzing with activity and full of sounds. But inside the rainforest the animal life may tell a different story of damage to their environment through a quieter soundscape.
Scientists from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and the University of Maryland, College Park, investigated how the acoustics of a forest can be a cost-effective indicator of its health.
Danielle Rappaport, then a doctoral student at the University of Maryland and now co-founder of the Amazon Investor Coalition, led this research beginning in 2016. She and her team combined acoustic data collected under the forest canopy with tree height measurements from aircraft flights and space-based observations of logging or fires from Landsat satellites. Landsat is a long-running partnership between NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey.
In forests that were burned multiple times, recordings of animal noises were quieter than in intact forest locations, leaving gaps in the soundscape and indicating that species that had been present before were now gone. As Rappaport ventured into these previously burned parts of the rainforest to place the recorders for the scientific measurements, she said she could feel the differences.
Read more at NASA
Photo Credit: jacobgaldston via Pixabay
