Satellite data shows that forest cover recovered particularly quickly after the extreme fires of late 2019.
Decimated by terrible fires at the end of 2019, the Australian forest is recovering particularly quickly. An international team, including researchers from the National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment (Inrae) and the Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), analyzed data from satellite observations captured by the European satellite Smos. They note that in the space of two years the forest cover has regained the equivalent of its initial area. This work was published in early September in the journal Remote Sensing of Environment .
“We measured the loss of biomass, in other words the weight of dry matter of the vegetation, of the plant cover before and after the fires, and the gain found since”, explains Jean-Pierre Wigneron, research director at Inrae. In 2019, the equivalent of 15% of forest biomass went up in smoke. If the fires have multiplied all over the island-continent, the coasts…