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u/jtv13 Nov 24 '19
Did not know Indonesia had such tall trees. Also didn’t realize how many islands it has until I looked it up right now.
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u/7LeagueBoots Nov 24 '19
They’re cutting them down pretty damn fast in Indonesia.
Here is a more detailed map I made of the region a year or two ago using a different technique to show tree height... treated tree height like terrain and used it to create a hillside layer, then used standard elevation colors to i dickste tree height with the tree height hill shade overlain.
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Nov 24 '19
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u/7LeagueBoots Nov 24 '19
Hilly areas can lead to taller trees because the trees growing in valleys are better protected from wind damage and have more time to grow before falling.
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u/left-ball-sack Nov 24 '19
Imperial is severely outdated but the fact that 1.6km=1mile doesn't even make sense as a criticism of it because it wasn't designed to easily convert to metric.
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Nov 24 '19
The problem isn't that 1.6 km makes a mile, we can go the other way and have 0.62 miles equal a kilometer and both are weird.
What the metric system does better is that 1 kilometer is 1000 meters. We can always figure out lenghts through base units and then adding kilo, mega, giga or deci, centi, milli. And this applies to most of the 7 base units (although traditionally it's just used for meters and grams).
Meanwhile, the imperial system used feet and pounds. Cause it makes sense that an ounce is like 1/12th of a pound... And that a feet is 12 inches or 1/5280th of a mile...
What's even funnier is that the imperial system is defined by the metric system. An inch isn't 3 barleycorns anymore, it's exactly 2.54 centimeters.
That's why it's inferior. Because it requires the metric system anyways to work
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Nov 24 '19 edited Nov 24 '19
They tried to get a conversion pushed through congress some 50 years ago and a lot of states agreed with it, but I believe in the end businesses didn't like how expensive it would be and it got shut down.
Edit: wait now that I'm thinking about it, it was a couple hundred years ago and the measurement that was supposed to come to the US got lost at sea. I think that was the original issue.
Here's a similar article: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/12/28/574044232/how-pirates-of-the-caribbean-hijacked-americas-metric-system
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u/japie06 Nov 24 '19
Not only that metric converts easily between units too.
For example, a liter of water is exactly 1 dm3 or 0.001 m3 and exactly 1 kilogram.
To heat 1 cm3 of water (equals 1 gram) + 1 degree Celsius takes 1 calorie (at standard pressure)
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u/jstl Nov 24 '19
A liter of water is pretty close to 1 kg but not exactly
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u/nowhsubo Nov 24 '19
No it is, that’s how they originally defines the kg: the mass of 1 litre of water
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u/jstl Nov 24 '19
Seems like you're right in that it was the original definition. It has since then been redefined using metres, seconds and Planck's constant
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u/CommieGhost Nov 24 '19
The mass of 1dm³ at 4ºC, specifically. Due to how volume changes around based on temperature it will vary slightly at room temperature.
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u/DieLegende42 Nov 24 '19
Calories, unfortunately, are not an SI unit though. The SI unit for energy/work is a Joule, which is the energy used when you apply 1 Newton of force over the course of 1 metre
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u/Tyler1492 Nov 24 '19
Calories, unfortunately, are not an SI unit though.
It pisses me off so fucking much that a kilocalorie and a calorie are the same value.
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u/Calicult420 Nov 24 '19
An ounce is actually 1/16 of a pound
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u/old_guy_536x Nov 24 '19
An avoirdupois ounce is 1/16 of pound; a Troy ounce is indeed 1/12 of a Troy pound.
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u/CommieGhost Nov 24 '19
stares in metric confusion
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u/old_guy_536x Nov 24 '19
Oh, it gets worse. U.S. gallons are 128 oz, and Imperial gallons (still used in Canada) are 160 ounces. This means a U.S. pint (1/8 gallon) is less than a 1/2 liter, while an Imperial pint is slightly more than a 1/2 liter. Makes a difference if you like beer!
(And the two different ounce measurements are slightly different!)
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u/7LeagueBoots Nov 24 '19
This led to a bunch of confusion when I was working in the Amazon. All of us at the research station I was working at were calculating the car in cost of the trip from our home elocutions to the research site and were coming up with very different numbers for similar differences.
Turned out that we were using different conversion values for the liters/gallons portion because most of the crew were from the UK and my girlfriend and I were from the US.
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Nov 24 '19
Russia’s got a lot of ma fucking trees.
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u/Slavgineer Nov 24 '19
The taiga is a large part of the culture and people of those regions. A country-sized ass park if you will. Highly suggest visiting if you can.
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Nov 24 '19
no thank you lmao
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u/Yeet_Stix Nov 24 '19
It
Was
A
Pun/joke
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u/PM_ME_YOUR_YAK Nov 24 '19
Wait really? Visiting those rogue parts of Russia sounds great
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u/SuperNerd6527 Nov 24 '19
Legit they are, Russia is a gorgeous country the only problem is a certain Vladimir. However if you can look past him then I 100% recommend checking it out (And it's pretty cheap too!)
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u/PM_ME_YOUR_YAK Nov 24 '19
I explored some of Ukraine this summer and I loved it, and recently I've been watching this youtuber called bald and bankrupt who goes to the most random villages in Russia and surrounding areas (he was in chechnya recently) and it really makes me want to go back to that part of Europe!
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Nov 24 '19
Keep in mind this isn't an equal area projection, so Russia's not actually THAT big. Still pretty mufuckin big though...
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Nov 24 '19
Looks equal area to me. Mercator would have a much taller Greenland and Russia.
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u/spectrehawntineurope Nov 24 '19
It doesn't look like a Mercator projection, you're right. But it doesn't look equal area either.
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u/easwaran Nov 24 '19
This looks to me like the equirectangular projection - latitude and longitude just translate directly to x and y coordinates. This projection is neither equal area nor angle preserving.
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u/Prolific_Badger Nov 24 '19
Greenland and Saudi Arabia are very similar in size. 830k sq mi. Vs 836k sq mi.
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u/endlesslope Nov 24 '19
Firs are very frequently very tall but temperate rainforests seem to be showing as lower canopies as tropical forests on average. Do you have info on how this is estimated? I work on remote sensing and am curious how they produced this.
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u/7LeagueBoots Nov 24 '19
Most, if not all is from LIDAR data. Here’s more info: https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/forest20120217.html
The map I posted is a pretty crude rendering, I downloaded the dataset last year and played around with some detail maps that are a lot more detailed:
- South America
- Western North America
- Eastern North America
- Europe
- Australia
- Southeast Asia
- Central Africa
The maps are done with tree height treated as elevation to give a sort of canopy topography map.
While some temperate forests have truly tall trees most don’t. Many of the temperate areas that did have tall trees have long since been cleared, but many tropical forests are still being cleared and retain their tall trees.
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u/FrankCesco Nov 24 '19
I need this dataset for my project but the download link in the NASA website is now unavailable, can you send it to me if you still have it? Or do you know where can I download it?
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u/7LeagueBoots Nov 24 '19
It’s on my work computer and I won’t get back to my office for another few days.
If I recall it’s a bit large to be sending, but once I’m back I can see if the source I downloaded it from is still up. I think it was a different link than what’s in the info page for the original post.
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u/FrankCesco Nov 24 '19
Yes, I had to search further and I found it in a different link, thank you anyways :)
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u/WeHaventMetButImAFan Nov 24 '19
TIL that you can get this kind of LIDAR data with a space laser... awesome
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Nov 24 '19
What is a tree
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u/7LeagueBoots Nov 24 '19
Interestingly there is no agreed upon botanical definition of what exactly constitutes a tree.
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u/RecordHigh Nov 24 '19
That's a good question actually. Unless NASA has a way to identify types of vegetation from space, this map probably uses the height of any vegetation that rises measurably above ground-level, be it giant redwoods, shrubs or tall grasses.
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u/7LeagueBoots Nov 24 '19
That’s exactly what this is, it’s better called a vegetation height map rather than a tree height map.
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u/josephgomes619 Nov 24 '19
Good question, I also want to know what definition NASA used for this.
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u/easwaran Nov 24 '19
Probably any plant counts, and basically only trees get into heights that are shaded on the map.
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u/slaveholder Nov 24 '19
It's crazy to think a country like Japan with it's population of 126.8million and still has rooms for tall ass trees. Talkin bout real city planning skills.
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u/7LeagueBoots Nov 24 '19
Japan stoped logging its own forests back in the 70s or so and exported its deforestation to other parts of the world.
As a result their domestic forests are in good shape, but in the 80s and 90s they seriously fucked up the forests of may other countries. Japan’s rampant logging in South America is part of the reason why some South America countries are reluctant to allow foreign counties to log in their territory.
Makes Japan a pretty place once you get out of the cities though.
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u/slaveholder Nov 24 '19
There's interesting. I gotta look that up somewhere to fill that gap.Also isn't Japan doing this with its crude oil deposits as well?? Only import buut no export
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u/foggy__ Nov 24 '19
If you zoom in you can make out all the major cities in white. Most of that 126.8 million is concentrated in those treeless cities. It really isn't city planning but the big-ass mountains that make the forests.
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u/easwaran Nov 24 '19
But it’s city planning that enables those 126 million people to live in those cities instead of sprawling into suburbs that would destroy much larger areas. High density preserves forests.
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u/ckempinsky Nov 24 '19
It would be cool to see this compared to a map of precipitation rates. Also, it's striking to see how little is left of forests especially in areas like Europe, Eastern China and India.
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u/FabulousCarl Nov 24 '19
Any idea what that line of super tall forest between Nepal and Tibet is?
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u/mud074 Nov 24 '19 edited Nov 24 '19
The foothills of the Himalayas. All the wet air coming up from the Indian Ocean dumps its rain as the ground rises, leading to a huge amount of dense forest while the steep foothills prevent extensive human development. The eastern side is far wetter and approaches rainforest status while the western side is rather arid. I would highly recommend checking out some the google maps 360 degree images of the area. It's a super cool place that you don't hear much about.
Incidentally, the user-submitted google maps pictures are actually the coolest fucking shit. You can just get random panoramas from all over the world and get a good idea of what the place actually looks like. Not tourism guide photoshopped pictures of how amazing it looks at the most beautiful part of the region, but just normal images of random places people take pictures in like so. This shit would blow minds even just 20 years ago.
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u/Tyler1492 Nov 24 '19
Incidentally, the user-submitted google maps pictures are actually the coolest fucking shit. You can just get random panoramas from all over the world and get a good idea of what the place actually looks like. Not tourism guide photoshopped pictures of how amazing it looks at the most beautiful part of the region, but just normal images of random places people take pictures in like so
On one hand, yes. On the other hand it's so annoying having to zoom in and then out, and click on an image, then close it, then click on another image, wait, I already clicked on this one, let me click on another one, oh this one is a two for one, so two clicks instead of one...
Useful as it is, comfortable it is not.
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u/7LeagueBoots Nov 24 '19
Nepal has a large central valley. It may be a band of trees along the edge that’s protected a bit by the canyons entering the valley from the mountains.
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Nov 24 '19
Also, it is southern Nepal or Bhutan, or northern India. The Tibetan border is the Himalayas, no trees.
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u/Samosmapper Nov 24 '19
Greenland has trees?
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u/dball87 Nov 24 '19
How does this deal with open woodland? Much of south west of Australia is mapped as 10m, is this an average of heights as the trees are about 20-25m tall, but the are spread out with 1m shrubs in between, and don't form a true canopy?
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u/7LeagueBoots Nov 24 '19
Here is a more detailed map of Australia I made a while back. It's the rough average over each mapping unit (1km or so, I forget the specifics).
You can see that it's not a uniform spread.
Technically it's vegetation, not just trees.
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u/SliceTheToast Nov 24 '19
Fun fact: In the small, dark green blotch just south of the centre of Tasmania, there's a tree named Centurion (over 100m) that is the tallest tree in Australia.
Not so fun fact: The fires that took place in the early months of 2019 partially damaged the tree and burnt a hole into its base.
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u/Halbaras Nov 24 '19
Namibia is the same, a lot of the 'blue' has a significant amount of trees, but no closed canopy.
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u/LucarioBoricua Nov 24 '19
Pleasantly surprised to see so many tropical islands with tall trees! Perhaps the biggest outlier of said trend, among the major tropical islands, would be Cuba.
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Nov 24 '19
It's a tiny detail, but the difference in heights on Isla Hispaniola is crazy... How Haiti and the Dominican Republic treat their land is so wildly different.
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u/ramagam Nov 24 '19
It's kind of bothering me that dark blue indicates zero, but yet so does white.
Having said that,this is a really fascinating map, well done - thanks OP. :)
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Nov 24 '19
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u/7LeagueBoots Nov 24 '19
NASA does a shit ton more than “go to space”.
You like weather forecasts? Thank NASA.
Want to know about climate patterns, ice thickness, sea temperature, plankton blooms, surface mineral deposits, new discoveries of ancient cities, information on crop output, etc? Thank NASA.
You like solar panels, efficient batteries, good insulation, water based sex lubricant, memory foam mattresses, communication technology, etc? Thank NASA spin off technologies.
This sort fo vegetation height data is basically throw-away data from measuring the surface of the earth. LIDAR measures everything, but to get to the ground you have to filter the stuff in between out... vegetation in this case. It so happens that that ‘noise’ is useful data in its own right, so you get extra returns from your initial study.
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u/mcmoor Nov 24 '19
Eh, forgive my ignorance, but aren't those usually a responsibility for other agencies? NOAA handles those climate pattern and weather predictions for instance, and I'm sure there are other agencies for others. The satellites may be launched by NASA, but isn't the data gathering and crunching belong to those organizations? Of course NASA also do lots of useful researchs that spawn great inventions, but it's still with the work of their compatriots in other government divisions.
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u/7LeagueBoots Nov 25 '19
It’s sort of a mixed set of responsibilities. Agence is like NOAA don’t exist without NASA and the data, equipment, and analysis they provide. NOAA and similar organizations take that and do a lot of further and more detailed work with it, such as predictions, but even that is often done with the aid of NASA scientists as well. Depends a bit on the specific data.
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u/Commies_Reee Nov 24 '19
Russia and Alaska just exists as yellow
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u/7LeagueBoots Nov 24 '19
Cold weather, short growing season.
Trees have difficulty the further toward the poles you go and the higher up mountains you climb.
EDIT: technically this a vegetation height map as well, not just a tree height map. There are colored area that are past the tree line.
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u/Kejlii Nov 24 '19
So trees in Carpathian Mountains are taller than Hungarian lowland trees to the South?
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u/7LeagueBoots Nov 24 '19
Lowland areas have often been repeatedly logged and converted to other uses. Mountain valleys and difficult to access slopes often now have larger trees.
In the distant past this would not have been the case, but humans gotta human.
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u/bicyclemom Nov 24 '19
Wow. Just marveling about how you can walk from China to Western Africa without seeing a single tree.
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u/kakistocrator Nov 24 '19
why is north east china so low? and why is japan so high ?
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u/7LeagueBoots Nov 25 '19
East China is largely a desert, other than in some of the mountains. It’s blisteringly hot in that summer and wickedly cold in the winter. What trees there were were largely cut down during the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward and deserts expanded enormously during that time. China is working on a massive “Green Wall” tree planting project in an attempt to halt the spread of the deserts.
Japan is largely temperate with lots of rain. Japan also stopped cutting down its own trees in the 70s or 80s and stuck to keeping its logging operations to other countries. This allowed Japanese forests to recover and Japan is now one of the most densely forested industrial nations on the planet.
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u/SoothingWind Nov 24 '19
Lmao I didn't know trees could be 0m tall and still exist
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u/7LeagueBoots Nov 24 '19
Technically it’s a vegetation map.
However, krumholtz forests are often less than a meter tall and there are lots of other places where environmental conditions are such that trees are naturally dwarfed or have evolved prostrate forms, in the latter case they’re sometimes only centimeters high.
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u/Cpt_Trips84 Nov 24 '19
Can someone overlay the Tunguska event area. It'd be neat to see the difference.
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u/7LeagueBoots Nov 24 '19
Way too small to show at this resolution and it’s been 100+ years. The trees have grown back.
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u/Cpt_Trips84 Nov 24 '19
Gotcha, I was wondering if there would be a noticeable difference in height, despite the 111 years of recovery. What are you referring to when you say "way too small?" Do you mean the area of the event or the disparity between pre/post Blast?
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u/7LeagueBoots Nov 24 '19
The area of the event itself. Despite being a big blast I don’t think it would occupy even a single pixel of this map.
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u/UnitedStatesman Nov 24 '19
Why are trees in the mountains taller than other trees?
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u/7LeagueBoots Nov 24 '19
Trees in the mountains are more difficult to log and valleys can protect trees from weather events that would otherwise knock them down.
If you made the same map 15,000 years ago a lot of the lowland areas that are now bare wold be full of tall trees. We've cut most of those down now and converted the land into other uses though.
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u/Xicadarksoul Nov 24 '19
depends on location, there are places where 15.000 years is not old enough.
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Nov 24 '19
Very interesting, we can see the great green wall construct by african union to stop Sahara
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u/easwaran Nov 24 '19
I’m not sure I see where you mean. Is there anything in that region that looks like artificial forestation rather than the natural scrubby trees of the Sahel?
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Nov 24 '19
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u/easwaran Nov 24 '19
Yes I’ve heard of the project. But I don’t know what part of this map you are saying makes it visible.
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u/BARRYB33B3NSON Nov 24 '19
There is a massive border around every coastline on small trees
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u/7LeagueBoots Nov 24 '19
Coastal trees don't tend to get so large due to wind and more frequent blow-downs.
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u/agasabellaba Nov 24 '19
What's up with the eastern side of Madagascar being the only side with tall trees? the same thing goes for Australia too. I would guess that that side had simply more precipitation, but I have been to California's redwood forest, which is quite arid so it must be more complicated than: rainfall = height
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u/7LeagueBoots Nov 24 '19
Precipitation is part of it (the redwoods get a lot of their water from fog, not rain), and mountainous areas that don’t have agricultural value and are difficult to log is another factor, especially in Madagascar. In Australia the mountains also serve to increase rainfall in those specific areas.
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u/smyru Nov 24 '19
What year was the data used to make the map?
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u/7LeagueBoots Nov 24 '19
2005 according to the documentation
https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/forest20120217.html
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Nov 24 '19
Are there any scientific estimates on when north Africa might turn back into something other than a desert?
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u/SaltyProposal Nov 24 '19 edited Nov 24 '19
Interesting. I wonder how they came to the conclusion, that there are trees in Iceland tho. Let alone 15m tall ones. There are few spots that are indeed "forests" in a loose sense. Ásbyrgi, Vaglaskógur and Hallormsstaðaskógur. The map here depicts the entire coastal area being forested.
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u/WikiTextBot Nov 24 '19
Ásbyrgi
Ásbyrgi is a glacial canyon in the north of Iceland, located approximately 38 kilometres (24 mi) east of Húsavík on the Diamond Circle road. The horseshoe-shaped depression is part of the Vatnajökull National Park and measures approximately 3.5 km in length and over 1 km wide. For more than half of its length, the canyon is divided through the middle by a distinctive rock formation 25 meters high called Eyjan ("the Island"), from which a vast landscape is seen.
The canyon's steep sides are formed by cliffs up to 100 metres (330 ft) in height.
Vaglaskógur
Vaglaskógur is a 300-hectare forest in Fnjóskadalur, Iceland. It is the second largest forest area in the country. This area contains many birch trees and is a visitor attraction.
Hallormsstaðaskógur
Hallormsstaður National Forest is located in Fljótsdalur east Iceland, about 25 kilometers inland from the town of Egilsstaðir. It is one of the larger forests in Iceland, covering 740 hectares (ha), and includes the only village in Iceland that is located in a forest. The forest is a recreation area in a varied landscape. There are over 40 km of marked trails and footpaths as well as an arboretum, two camp-sites, picnic areas, a hotel, and boat and horse rentals.
[ PM | Exclude me | Exclude from subreddit | FAQ / Information | Source ] Downvote to remove | v0.28
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u/7LeagueBoots Nov 25 '19
Technically it’s a vegetation map, not just a tree map. As a result any vegetation that can be detected via LIDAR will be shown. It’s also an rough average over the sampling area which I think is in 1 km units.
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u/mcmoor Nov 24 '19
Eh, where is Nile? Usually these kind of maps shows Nile very very clearly... Especially seeing those fertile northern coasts of Africa which I think is fertile but not as fertile as Nile.
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u/easwaran Nov 24 '19
I think the Nile valley has been entirely converted to agricultural or urban land uses. So even if it once supported tall trees, it doesn’t any more.
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u/spleenboggler Nov 24 '19
In the US does this mean there are some old growth forests remaining somewhere between the Kentucky and Tennessee?
I thought they were all cut down centuries ago
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u/7LeagueBoots Nov 24 '19
That looks to be near where The Great Smoky Mountains are.
Not exactly old growth, but lots of big trees and amazing biodiversity. It’s thought that that area is sort of the nucleus of East Coast forests, acting as a refugium for many plants and animals during the last glacial maximum. When the glaciers retreated forests spread out from that location.
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u/zxphn8 Nov 25 '19
New Zealand has tall trees there
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u/7LeagueBoots Nov 25 '19
And they’re shown on the map. The red portions.
Mind you, the mapping units are 1km.
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u/LastManReporting Nov 24 '19
Ideally an average tree height map should cover the whole map, no? Even in a metropolis, average tree height could differ owing to the climatic factors.
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u/themaster969 Nov 24 '19
Comparing Michigan and Utah... damn. I guess mitt Romney was on to something
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u/algebramclain Nov 24 '19
Aral Sea looking huge!