Japan, U.N. food body team up on forest monitoring via satellite

Japan's space agency and the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization have agreed to cooperate on monitoring global forests and mangroves -- considered a sponge for greenhouse gases -- by utilizing data of observation satellites amid deepening concerns over climate change.The partnership adds observation data -- accumulated by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, for over 25 years -- from the powerful L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar to FAO's widely-used toolkit to monitor forests, according to the organizations."As deforestation and land-use changes are one of the leading sources …READ FULL ARTICLE