In a forest outside the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai, a drone moves back and forth atop the rich canopy, transmitting photos to be knitted into a 3D model of the woodland's health and an estimate of how much carbon it can absorb. Drones are part of an increasingly sophisticated arsenal used by scientists to understand forests and their role in the battle against climate change.
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NewsTranscript
00:00 [Music]
00:24 What we're doing today is we're going to fly a drone mission over the plot to
00:29 construct a 3D model of the forest using two-dimensional photographs.
00:35 [Music]
00:57 These estimates are not accurate enough so doing extrapolation with these
01:02 estimations which are too optimistic can give too much hope and too much
01:09 optimism in the possibilities of forests to store carbon in the short term.
01:14 [Music]
01:24 We use this, we're collecting the soil and we weigh it.
01:29 How long is that sample?
01:35 [Music]
01:47 So the aim is to estimate at the country level for every places in every
01:54 location in Thailand to calculate how much carbon can be stored by one hectare
02:01 of forest everywhere in Thailand.
02:03 [Music]
02:15 [BLANK_AUDIO]