Abstract

Abstract

Tropical forest degradation is an important contributor to forest carbon fluxes, but it is difficult to quantify its effects using existing remote sensing. As a result, degradation is difficult to incorporate into national reporting, with no internationally agreed-upon definition or consistent monitoring mechanism. This talk will cover ongoing international efforts to define and monitor forest degradation, highlighting mismatches between the policy and remote sensing communities. It will propose a novel method that takes advantage of occasional repeat measurements from a spaceborne lidar sensor (GEDI) to capture the impacts of forest degradation. Finally, based on this methodology, it will present results on the carbon emissions and forest structural changes induced by multiple drivers of tropical degradation.

Bio

Amelia Holcomb is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Maryland on NASA ’s GEDI mission team. Her work focuses on measuring dynamic frontiers of degradation, deforestation, and regrowth in dense tropical forests using spaceborne lidar and other remote sensing instruments. She is particularly interested in bridging disciplinary divides, bringing computer science techniques to large-scale remote sensing problems and ensuring that scientific outputs translate to policy outcomes. She earned her PhD from the University of Cambridge studying computer science and plant sciences. She also holds a masters degree from the University of Waterloo and a B.A. in mathematics from Yale University. Prior to her life as a research scientist, she worked as a software engineer at Google.