NASA Study Reveals Tropical Forests Absorb Far More CO2 Than Expected

There may be some good news for tropical forests. Scientists have found that these forests may be absorbing far more carbon dioxide than thought in response to rising atmospheric levels of the greenhouse gas.

Forests and other vegetation remove up to 30 percent of human-created carbon dioxide emissions from the atmosphere during photosynthesis. If this rate of absorption were to slow down, though, the rate of global warming would speed up in turn. That's why researchers decided to calculate exactly how much carbon dioxide is being absorbed.

"Until our analysis, no one had successfully completed a global reconciliation of information about carbon dioxide effects from the atmosphere, forestry and modeling communities," said Joshua Fisher, co-author of the new study, in a news release. "It is incredible that all these different types of independent data sources start to converge on an answer."

In this case, the researchers made comparisons of carbon dioxide from many sources at different scales. They used computer models of ecosystem processes, atmospheric models, satellite images, data from experimental plots and more. In the end, they reconciled all types of analyses and then assessed the accuracy of the results.

In the end, the researchers found that tropical forests absorb about 1.4 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide out of the total global absorption of 2.5 billion, which is far more than is absorbed by the forests in Canada, Siberia and other northern regions, called boreal forests.

The findings reveal that tropical forests may play a huge role in the future when it comes to carbon dioxide absorption. More specifically, the new findings show what's happening at the global scale when it comes to carbon dioxide fertilization. It also shows that tropical forests play a much larger role than boreal forests.

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