In our minds, the desert seems irrelevant to life. Except for a few extremely hardy plants such as camel thorns and cacti, there appears to be no other life. Not only us, but scientists too have long held this idea and impression of deserts.
But a recent study has changed their perception of the desert. They never imagined that the desert, which we call 'barren', could contain life.
The Sahara Desert is the largest desert in the world, covering some 9.06 million square kilometers of the African continent, or 94.4% of our national territory. The climate is extremely harsh, and it is considered one of the most inhospitable regions on Earth.
To its south lies the Sahel region, which has an average annual temperature of 27°C and a rainfall of 200-700 mm. It is one of the poorest and most barren regions globally.
No one could have imagined that there were some 1.8 billion trees spread over just part of the semi-humid region of the Western Sahara and Sahel Desert! This staggering figure was previously unthinkable to anyone, but recent statistics prove the figure and turn our perceptions upside down.
Martin Brandt, assistant professor at the Department of Earth Sciences and Natural Resources Management at the University of Copenhagen, who led the study, said, "We were surprised that so many trees were growing in the Sahara desert.
Of course, there are large areas where no trees grow, but there are still some areas with a very high density of trees, and even between the sand dunes, there are a few scattered trees."
In fact, counting the number of these trees is not easy. Of course, it is not possible to count trees one by one, but we need to use the power of satellites to do so. For areas where there are more trees, the work will be easier
Our satellites already have a high enough resolution to distinguish the trees from the surrounding soil and present a clearer image for scientists to study.
However, difficulties arise in areas where there are relatively few trees. If the number of trees in a given area is small, just scattered one by one, then the resolution of the satellite will not be sufficient to identify it, and even a few trees will be difficult to identify.
Even very high-resolution images can only achieve breakthroughs in small groups of trees, and the difficulty of identifying individual trees remains extremely high. This task is especially difficult in very open areas.
Solving this problem becomes the key to this study. Brandt and his team used a clever method of combining very high-resolution images with deep machine learning to discover these trees. In other words, they "taught" the computer how to identify a tree through a program. The process may sound simple, but it is actually very complex.
Desert plants may seem to survive in a harsh environment, but their role in nature cannot be underestimated. As researchers have found, information from these desert plants is fundamental to our understanding of ecology, biogeography, and the biogeochemical cycling of carbon, water, and other nutrients across the planet.
If we had more information about desert plants, we would be able to determine more accurately how much carbon is stored in these areas. This is often ignored by climate scientists when building climate models.
We know that the Earth's climate is facing unprecedented challenges and that this vast climate system may actually be influenced by small factors, known as the butterfly effect. With this in mind, we cannot ignore the environment and climate of any region.
