Expedition into the Darién rain forest in Panama

In January a team of scientist visited the Darién rain forest. It was one of the biggest scientific expeditions of the last decades into the region. The rain forest between Panama and Columbia is regarded as one of the last largely untouched forests in the world and is recognized as a “biodiversity hotspot”. The goal of the expedition was to quantify the carbon content of pristine tropical low land forests and its relation to plant and animal species diversity. Another goal was to analyse the spatial patterns of historical land use of indigenous people in the region.

The expedition was led by Prof. Catherine Potvin (McGill University, Canada) and was accompanied by scientists from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI, Panama) and the Emberá indigenous people. A team from our professorship (Dr. Matthias Kunz and Friedrich Reich) were responsible to document and measure the forest structure and above-ground biomass. For this purpose a state-of-the-art three-dimensional surveying technique based on terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) was applied. With our RIEGL VZ-400i laser scanner system it was possible to capture the first terrestrial laser scans of parts of this important tropical forest. Currently the data are analysed and the results will help to answer pressing questions in the field of ecology and biodiversity.

The expedition was supported by the Gesellschaft von Freunden und Förderern der TU Dresden e.V. (GFF), the Institute for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing of the TU Dresden as well as RIEGL Laser Measurement Systems GmbH.

Autor: Matthias Kunz