NASA wants people to point their phones at trees to help measure its height

Many people upload pictures of nature, trees in particular, on social media. NASA is now asking users to do that more for the sake of science to help measure trees’ height.

NASA has ICESat-2 satellite up in space in order to estimate the height of trees from up there. Now NASA has created a new tool for citizen scientists that can help check those measurements from the ground.

In order to verify the measurements taken from space, NASA has launched a GLOBE Observer app that is easily available for download. The person can choose from different tools that record cloud observations, mosquito habitats, and landscape around them, along with a new tool for measuring trees called GLOBE Trees.

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Upon opening the app, there is a tutorial that teaches how to calibrate the app and take measurements that lets it triangulate tree heights, explained The Verge. The user can select a tree (bent and broken ones do not get measured).

After selecting the tree, the user has to stake out a spot about 25 to 75ft away and hold up the phone right in front of their face and angle it to measure the base and then the tree’s top. Then they would have to take a picture, count their steps to the tree, log their position at its base, and the app gives the tree’s height.

“ICESat-2 will measure the heights of forest canopies worldwide—and the GLOBE Observer app is another way to collect even more data,” said project scientist Tom Neumann. “It’ll be interesting to see what the difference is.”

The ICESat-2 was launched back in September last year and carries an instrument called ATLAS that shoots 60,000 pulses of light at Earth’s surface every second it orbits the planet. “It’s basically a laser in space,” described Neumann.

By measuring the satellite’s position, the angle and how long it takes for those laser beams to bounce back from the surface, the researchers are able to measure the elevation of sea ice, land ice, the ocean, inland water and trees. By knowing how tall trees are, scientists can estimate the health of the world’s forests and amount of carbon dioxide soaked up by them.