Recently, the BBC published an article by Victoria Gill, science correspondent for BBC News, as well as a TV report concluding that the UK’s forests, and by extension all other forests worldwide, are storing more carbon than expected. The article is based on an international project that uses 3D laser scanning for data acquisition. The relevant results of the study were published in December 2022 in the paper “Laser scanning reveals potential underestimation of biomass carbon in temperate forest”.
The research team, including Kim Calders, Hans Verbeeck, Andrew Burt, Niall Origo, Joanne Nightingale, Yadvinder Malhi, Phil Wilkes, Pasi Raumonen, Robert G. H. Bunce, and Mathias Disney created a 3D data cloud during the study that shows that the current biomass over the ground stores 1.77 times more CO2 than the current model estimates.
For data acquisition a RIEGL VZ-400 3D Terrestrial Laser Scanner was used. Terrestrial laser scan data were collected in leaf-off conditions throughout late November 2015, December 2015 and January 2016.
The paper was published in the Ecological Solutions and Evidence Volume 3, Issue 4 and can be found here.
The BBC TV report on the study was posted on LinkedIn by co-author Joanne Nightingale – you can find it here.
