Forests: in 12 years lost area - Corriere della Sera

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The analysis carried out thanks to NASA and Google Earth

Forests: in 12 years
lost an area of ??1.5 million km ²

The performance of the world’s forests from 2000 to 2012 obtained from the analysis of satellite imagery 654000

Into To compile the map were analyzed 143 billion pixel 654 000 Landsat satellite images. At the end of this huge work was compiled the most accurate map of the state of forests in the world from 2000 to 2012. The research, which was published Nov. 15 in the journal Science, was attended by scientists from the University of Maryland, Google, the State University of New York, the Center for ricercaWoods Hole, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) and the South Dakota State University. Key to the whole research, however, has been the help of Google Earth, which has played in the “cloud” Google mathematical models developed at the University of Maryland to analyze the data of Landsat.

DATA – What emerged was the loss of a forest area of ??2,300,000 square kilometers. The partial good news is that in an area of ??800,000 km ² grew new forests. But in the world so there are 1.5 million km ² of forests in the least. In twelve years has gone a wooded area five times the size of Italy.

Roads, intensive agriculture, livestock
So the Amazon is becoming a hell

RESULT – The map shows that the greatest losses of forests took place at high latitudes, particularly in Alaska, Canada and in eastern Siberia. Other significant losses have occurred on the southern edge of the Amazon, in the tropical forests of Sumatra and Borneo in Indonesia and Malaysia, in south-western Australia. By contrast, the highest increases were registered in the forest south-eastern United States and Chile In Europe forests during the first twelve years of the twenty-first century have remained substantially unchanged: losses in France (Aquitaine) and recoveries in Portugal.

Paul Virtuani