The lush tropical rainforests of Papua New Guinea are not the unspoilt haven that many believed till now. In fact, they are disappearing faster than those in the Amazon.
That’s the conclusion of a team led by Phil Shearman of the remote sensing centre at the University of Papua New Guinea (PNG) in Port Moresby, who applied pattern recognition software to recent satellite images, and paired the results with map data from the 1970s to reconstruct the rate of forest loss. The team presented its findings on Monday at a workshop on climate change, forests and carbon trading in Port Moresby.…
