New rainforest mapping technology gets hu...(sources will be used to develop the new ...)

Date:1/6/2009

sources, will be used to develop the new HiFIS instrumentation with vastly improved infrared sensing technology. This new technology will help us to capture previously hidden 'chemical fingerprints' of rain forest species. My hope is to take the science, conservation, and management of these diverse ecosystems to levels only imagined until now. It will be a new era in the rain forest research."

The Carnegie Spectranomics Project plans to map rain forests in Africa, Southeast Asia, Amazonia, the Caribbean, and the western Pacific. The Moore-supported High-Fidelity Imaging Spectrometer sub-component will be developed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and integrated with the existing Carnegie LiDAR system to create the Airborne Taxonomic Mapping System, or AToMS. The existing instrument system, which successfully imaged complex ecosystems in Hawaii and South Africa, was enabled by generous grants from the W. M. Keck Foundation and Carnegie trustee William R. Hearst, III.

The team is also constructing a database of plant chemical fingerprints by collecting plants on the ground and calibrating their chemistry with spectroscopic measurements from the air to establish a library of thousands of individual species. For more information about the Carnegie Airborne Observatory and the Spectranomics Project see http://spectranomics.ciw.edu/

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Contact: Greg Asner gpa@ciw.edu 650-380-2828 Carnegie Institution Source:Eurekalert

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