Specialists from the University of Paris-Saclay in a publication in Nature Geoscience reported that during the 2010s, temperate and boreal forests located in the Northern Hemisphere of the Earth, linked more carbon contained in the atmosphere than the humid tropical forests, which were previously considered leaders in this indicator. It is noted that the shift in the carbon balance in the tropics towards emissions was due to the impact of logging combined with unsustainable land use.
According to the researchers, the dynamic global land cover models used in predicting climate change significantly overestimate the ability of tropical forests to absorb carbon.
The researchers used L-VOD satellite data to estimate the carbon balance of temperate and boreal forests. This information had previously been impossible to obtain because of radio interference that distorted the signal around cities, but the scientists were able to solve the problem by using a new filtering method they had developed.
