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Scientists from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

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along with their international collaborators have demonstrated a new method

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for mapping the location and size of trees growing outside of forests.

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The big surprise?

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They discovered an unexpectedly high number of trees in semi-arid regions,

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often thought of as too dry to support plant life.

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Mapping non-forest trees with this level of precision was

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previously impossible across broad areas.

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This technology represents a breakthrough

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for mapping and measuring these trees.

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Using powerful supercomputers and machine learning algorithms,

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the team mapped the crown size

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which is the width of a tree when viewed from above

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of more than 1.8 billion trees across an area of

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more than half a million square miles.

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This study is the first in a series whose goal

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is not only to map non-forest trees across a wide area,

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but also to calculate how much carbon they store

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vital information for understanding the carbon cycle and how it is changing over time.

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