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SmallerMUNCIE, Ind. - With funding from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, a geography professor at Ball State University is using innovative remote sensing to study vegetation and its effects on the global climate.
"Healthy, growing vegetation absorbs carbon dioxide, thus reducing global warming," said Abdullah Rahman. "In order to check the growth of carbon in the atmosphere, we need to know where it is going to sink or be absorbed. We pretty much know the sources of carbon; it's the sink of carbon that is controversial."
Rahman's development of an efficient remote sensing-based method will help scientists monitor and manage the carbon balance in the atmosphere.
Rahman is trying to find how much carbon is taken in by different vegetation types including deciduous forest, evergreen forest, tundra, semi-arid grassland, chaparral, and tall-grass prairie. Carbon dioxide sensors have been placed at sites scattered all over the country including one in Morgan Monroe State Forest. Mounted on tall towers, the sensors gather carbon data at different elevations. Rahman then compares this information with image data supplied by NASA. The imagery comes mainly from high-flying airplanes, but some data are from a satellite platform called MODIS.
Rahman is being assisted on campus by graduate students Kristy Stultz and Vicente Cordova. Stultz is putting together the massive amount of carbon data from the study sites and working with the ground-based remote sensing data collected during the last two years. She presented some of her findings at the Ecological Society of America meeting last year. Cordova is using a modeling approach with the carbon data and comparing the values with results derived from the imagery. This research will be his future thesis topic.
"This research will help policymakers to come up with new and improved regulations that will be environmentally friendly," Rahman said.
(NOTE TO EDITORS: For more information on this story, contact Abdullah Rahman at (765) 285-1172. For more stories, visit the Ball State University News Center at www.bsu.edu/news on the World Wide Web.)
"Healthy, growing vegetation absorbs carbon dioxide, thus reducing global warming," said Abdullah Rahman. "In order to check the growth of carbon in the atmosphere, we need to know where it is going to sink or be absorbed. We pretty much know the sources of carbon; it's the sink of carbon that is controversial."
Rahman's development of an efficient remote sensing-based method will help scientists monitor and manage the carbon balance in the atmosphere.
Rahman is trying to find how much carbon is taken in by different vegetation types including deciduous forest, evergreen forest, tundra, semi-arid grassland, chaparral, and tall-grass prairie. Carbon dioxide sensors have been placed at sites scattered all over the country including one in Morgan Monroe State Forest. Mounted on tall towers, the sensors gather carbon data at different elevations. Rahman then compares this information with image data supplied by NASA. The imagery comes mainly from high-flying airplanes, but some data are from a satellite platform called MODIS.
Rahman is being assisted on campus by graduate students Kristy Stultz and Vicente Cordova. Stultz is putting together the massive amount of carbon data from the study sites and working with the ground-based remote sensing data collected during the last two years. She presented some of her findings at the Ecological Society of America meeting last year. Cordova is using a modeling approach with the carbon data and comparing the values with results derived from the imagery. This research will be his future thesis topic.
"This research will help policymakers to come up with new and improved regulations that will be environmentally friendly," Rahman said.
(NOTE TO EDITORS: For more information on this story, contact Abdullah Rahman at (765) 285-1172. For more stories, visit the Ball State University News Center at www.bsu.edu/news on the World Wide Web.)
