Thirty years of satellite images shows us how climate change is threating mangroves

Australia is home to around two percent of the world’s mangrove forests and is the fifth most mangrove-forested country on Earth. Mangroves play a crucial role in the ecosystem thanks to the dizzying array of plants, animals and birds they feed, house and protect. Mangrove forests help protect coastal communities from cyclones and storms by absorbing the brunt of a storm’s energy. They help our fight against climate change by storing vast amounts of carbon that would otherwise be released as greenhouse gases.

In other words, mangroves are some of our most precious ecosystems. Despite their importance, there is much we don’t know about these complex wetland forests. For example, when does their growing season start? And, how long does it last?

Usually, answering these types of questions requires frequent data collection in the field, but that can be costly and time-consuming. An alternative is to use satellite images. In the future, this will allow us to track the impacts of climate change on mangroves and other forests.

What is phenology?

Our research used satellite images to study the life cycles of mangrove forests in the Northern Territory, Queensland, and New South Wales. We compared the satellite images with field data collected in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, and found a surprising degree of variation in mangrove life cycles.

We’re using the phrase life cycle, but the scientific term is “phenology”. Phenology is the study of periodic events in the life cycles of plants and animals. For example, some plants flower and fruit during the spring and summer, and some lose their leaves in autumn and winter.

Phenology is important because when plants are growing, they absorb carbon from the atmosphere and store it in their leaves, trunks, roots, and in the soil. As phenology is often affected by environmental conditions, studying phenology helps us understand how climate change is affecting Australian ecosystems such as mangrove forests.

So how can we learn a lot in a short amount of time about mangrove phenology? That’s where satellite imagery comes in.

How we use satellites to study mangrove phenology

Satellites are an excellent tool to study changes in forest health, area, and phenology. Some satellites have been taking images of Earth for decades, giving us the chance to look back at the state of mangrove forests from 30 years ago or more.

You can think of satellite images much like the photo gallery in your smartphone: you can see many of your family members in a single image, and you can see how everyone grows and “blooms” over time. In the case of mangroves, we can see different regions and species in a single satellite image, and we can use past images to study the life cycles of mangrove forests.

For example, satellite images depicted below, which use data from the Australian government’s National Maps website, show how mangroves forests have changed in the Kimberley region of Western Australia between 1990 and 2019. You can see how the mangrove forest has reduced in some areas, but expanded in others. Overall, this mangrove forest seems to be doing pretty well thanks in large part to the fact this area has a reasonably small human population.

 

Images: NationalMap/Data61

But satellite monitoring is not enough on its own and cannot capture the detail you can get on the ground. For example, satellites cannot capture the flowering or fruiting of mangroves because flowers are often too small and fruits are often camouflaged. Also, satellites cannot capture what happens under the canopy.

It is also important to recognise the work of researchers on the ground. Ground data allows us to validate or confirm the information we see in satellite images. When we noted some mangrove forests were growing leaves twice per year, we validated this observation with field data, and confirmed with experts in mangrove ecosystems. Field data is crucial to understand the life cycles of ecosystems worldwide and how forests are responding to changes in the climate.

Nicolás Younes Cárdenas, Postdoctoral research fellow, James Cook University; Karen Joyce, Senior Lecturer - Remote sensing and spatial information, James Cook University, and Stefan W Maier, Adjunct Research Fellow, James Cook University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

 

from Firstpost Tech Latest News https://ift.tt/39IcU0j