Field of Science

Rainforest diversity

It's hard to describe rainforest diversity to people who have not seen it, but it's even harder to visualize. This is a false-color image of a rainforest where each color represents a certain degree of tree diversity, different species, different genera, or maybe different families. The ability to image diversity this way based on reflective differences in species chemistry will allow many studies of rainforests that simply aren't possible from the ground, or if they are possible, then in much shorter amounts of time. But you wonder what it means when what appears to be the crown of a single tree is a collage of a dozen or more colors. Lots of epiphytes? But this just looks cool and you really need the big box of crayollas to do this kind of work. You only need a box of 8 to handle most temperate zone forests. Of course, seen in real life it's just all green. Too bad it's not really all these colors, not even in Oz.

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