New Zealand sites will be used as part of an upcoming European Space Agency (ESA) mission to better understand the role forests play in the carbon and water cycle.

This will provide direct measurements of New Zealand forests’ productivity, carbon sequestration and health, informing land management decisions at a local and national level and giving insights into the impact of drought and extreme weather events on native and exotic forests.

The ESA recently announced it will use eight locations in the Northland, Auckland and Manawatu-Wanganui regions as part of its mission to ensure its models are reliable and can produce accurate results. These locations are already established research sites: they have been used in Forest Flows and NZ-NASA Joint Research Partnership in Earth Observation research, led by Bioeconomy Science Institute scientist Dean Meason, which used cutting-edge tools such as IoT (internet of things) sensor networks and remote sensing, big data and AI analytics.

Mr Meason says New Zealand is a valuable location for Biomass Mission validation, thanks to its different climatic zones, geology, soil properties and vegetation structures.

“Having one tree species (radiata pine), planted across different sites means the Biomass algorithms can be more accurately developed, building a better understanding of how trees interact with the environment, especially water.

“This will help ESA scientists more effectively interpret Biomass data from more complex forests in New Zealand and throughout the world,” he says. “This project raises the importance of New Zealand for such satellite missions for ESA, as well as NASA, and how New Zealand researchers are developing valuable world-leading science in these areas.”

The Biomass mission is designed to collect important information about the state of New Zealand’s forests and how they are changing. The New Zealand research will focus on Biomass secondary products that measure water inside trees.

“The research will help us better understand how soils and the environment impact tree water uptake and water use,” Mr Meason says .

“It will also show us how Biomass data can be combined with data from other satellite missions to better understand the hydrological cycle in temperate and tropical forests throughout the world – and how tree growth and productivity influences the hydrological cycle.

“This work would not be possible without the novel technology and science developed by the Bioeconomy Science Institute under the Forest Flows programme.”