Study Finds How Much Carbon Is Stored In Africa’s Trees

An international team of scientists, including NASA researchers, have used commercial, high-resolution satellite images and artificial intelligence to map almost 10-billion individual trees in Africa’s drylands. The result is the first comprehensive estimate of tree carbon density in the Saharan, Sahel, and Sudanian zones of Africa, reported in Nature. The team found there are far more trees spread across semi-arid regions of Africa than previously thought, but they store less carbon than some models have predicted. The estimated total carbon locked up in African drylands is 0,84 petagrams (1-billion metric tons).