Technology can change our understanding of nature.
科技可以改变我们对自然界的认识
Take for example the case of lions. For centuries, it's been said that female lions do all of the hunting out in the open savanna, and male lions do nothing until it's time for dinner. You've heard this too, I can tell. Well recently, I led an airborne mapping campaign in the Kruger National Park in South Africa. Our colleagues put GPS tracking collars on male and female lions, and we mapped their hunting behavior from the air. The lower left shows a lion sizing up a herd of impala for a kill, and the right shows what I call the lion viewshed. That's how far the lion can see in all directions until his or her view is obstructed by vegetation. And what we found is that male lions are not the lazy hunters we thought them to be. They just use a different strategy. Whereas the female lions hunt out in the open savanna over long distances, usually during the day, male lions use an ambush strategy in dense vegetation, and often at night. This video shows the actual hunting viewsheds of male lions on the left and females on the right. Red and darker colors show more dense vegetation, and the white are wide open spaces. And this is the viewshed right literally at the eye level of hunting male and female lions. All of a sudden, you get a very clear understanding of the very spooky conditions under which male lions do their hunting.
举个狮子的例子吧 几个世纪以来,人们都说 雌狮子在热带草原上捕猎食物 而雄狮子除了吃什么都不干 我相信你一定也听说过这个 最近我带了一个在南非克鲁格国家公园的 机载测绘活动 同事们用GPS项圈 跟踪公狮子和母狮子 这样我们就可以从空中 测绘它们的捕猎活动 左下是一只狮子 在对一群黑斑羚虎视眈眈 右边是我所称之为 狮子视域范围 在各个方向的可视距离 直到他或她的视觉受到植被的阻挡 我们发现 雄狮子其实并不是 我们以为的懒猎手 只是它们的策略不同罢了 雌狮子常常会在广阔的热带大草原上 远距离凶猛出击 通常是在白天 而雄狮子常常喜欢夜晚 在密林里伏击 这个视频的左边和右边 分别展示的是 雄狮子和雌狮子狩猎时候的可视域 红色和更深一点的颜色表示的是比较茂密的丛林 白色则是视野比较广阔的空间 这完全是捕猎中的雄狮子和雌狮子 与视线齐平的可视域 对于雄狮子捕猎时候 那令人毛骨损然的场景 我想你应该会一下子有了一个清晰的认识
I bring up this example to begin, because it emphasizes how little we know about nature. There's been a huge amount of work done so far to try to slow down our losses of tropical forests, and we are losing our forests at a rapid rate, as shown in red on the slide. I find it ironic that we're doing so much, yet these areas are fairly unknown to science. So how can we save what we don't understand?
我在一开始就拿出这个例子 是想强调我们对于自然其实知之甚少 截至目前我们已经做了大量的努力 试图减缓热带雨林的消失 而正如幻灯片上红色所标识的 我们的森林正在迅速失去 我觉得很讽刺的是我们做了很多 但对这些区域科学界却是完全未知的 而我们又如何能够挽救自己完全未知的东西呢?
Now I'm a global ecologist and an Earth explorer with a background in physics and chemistry and biology and a lot of other boring subjects, but above all, I'm obsessed with what we don't know about our planet. So I created this, the Carnegie Airborne Observatory, or CAO. It may look like a plane with a fancy paint job, but I packed it with over 1,000 kilos of high-tech sensors, computers, and a very motivated staff of Earth scientists and pilots. Two of our instruments are very unique: one is called an imaging spectrometer that can actually measure the chemical composition of plants as we fly over them. Another one is a set of lasers, very high-powered lasers, that fire out of the bottom of the plane, sweeping across the ecosystem and measuring it at nearly 500,000 times per second in high-resolution 3D. Here's an image of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, not far from where I live. Although we flew straight over this bridge, we imaged it in 3D, captured its color in just a few seconds. But the real power of the CAO is its ability to capture the actual building blocks of ecosystems. This is a small town in the Amazon, imaged with the CAO. We can slice through our data and see, for example, the 3D structure of the vegetation and the buildings, or we can use the chemical information to actually figure out how fast the plants are growing as we fly over them. The hottest pinks are the fastest-growing plants. And we can see biodiversity in ways that you never could have imagined. This is what a rainforest might look like as you fly over it in a hot air balloon. This is how we see a rainforest, in kaleidoscopic color that tells us that there are many species living with one another. But you have to remember that these trees are literally bigger than whales, and what that means is that they're impossible to understand just by walking on the ground below them. So our imagery is 3D, it's chemical, it's biological, and this tells us not only the species that are living in the canopy, but it tells us a lot of information about the rest of the species that occupy the rainforest.
现在我是一名地球生态学者也是一名地球探索者 我有着物理、化学、生物 以及许多其它枯燥学科的背景 而最重要的是,我对这个星球上的未知事物 非常之着迷 所以我创建了这个 卡内基机载天文台(Carnegie Airborne Observatory),或者可以简称为CAO 它看起来只像是一架漆得很花哨的飞机 但其实装载着1,000公斤的 高科技传感器、计算机 以及一支由许多地球科学家和飞行员 组成的充满活力的队伍 我们有两台很稀罕的设备 一台被叫作成像光谱仪 当我们在高空飞行时,它可以测量那些 从我们身下掠过的植物的化学成分 另一个是一套 绝对高性能的激光器 从飞机底部放射激光 迅速扫过整个生态系统 并以接近每秒500,000次采样的速度 进行高精度的3D测量 这是旧金山金门大桥的图片 离我住的地方不远 虽然我们从桥上直接飞过 我们对它做了3D影像 在几秒钟的时间就捕捉到了它的颜色 但实际上CAO真正的实力 在于它捕捉生态系统 实际构造的能力 这是CAO为亚马逊一个小镇 做的影像 通过我们的数据切片我们可以看到 比如像是 植被和建筑物的3D结构 甚至我们可以用一些化学信息 在我们飞过那些植物的时候 计算出它们的生长速度 这些最热烈的粉色也就是生长最快的那些植物 我们可以用超出你想象的方式 看到生物的多样性 这是你乘着热气球飞过热带雨林时候 看到的它的样子 它用斑斓的色彩 告诉我们 有许许多多的生物生活在一起 但你必须认识到 这些树的确是比鲸鱼还要巨大的 这就意味着仅仅是从它们下面走过 是无法认识它们的 我们所呈现的图像是3D的,带有化学和生物学的信息, 告诉我们在这苍穹下生活的 不仅仅只有我们人类 它为我们提供了很多新的信息 有关在这热带雨林中生活着的其它生物
Now I created the CAO in order to answer questions that have proven extremely challenging to answer from any other vantage point, such as from the ground, or from satellite sensors. I want to share three of those questions with you today. The first questions is, how do we manage our carbon reserves in tropical forests? Tropical forests contain a huge amount of carbon in the trees, and we need to keep that carbon in those forests if we're going to avoid any further global warming. Unfortunately, global carbon emissions from deforestation now equals the global transportation sector. That's all ships, airplanes, trains and automobiles combined. So it's understandable that policy negotiators have been working hard to reduce deforestation, but they're doing it on landscapes that are hardly known to science. If you don't know where the carbon is exactly, in detail, how can you know what you're losing? Basically, we need a high-tech accounting system. With our system, we're able to see the carbon stocks of tropical forests in utter detail. The red shows, obviously, closed-canopy tropical forest, and then you see the cookie cutting, or the cutting of the forest in yellows and greens. It's like cutting a cake except this cake is about whale deep. And yet, we can zoom in and see the forest and the trees at the same time. And what's amazing is, even though we flew very high above this forest, later on in analysis, we can go in and actually experience the treetrops, leaf by leaf, branch by branch, just as the other species that live in this forest experience it along with the trees themselves.
现在我创建了CAO 就是为了回答那些被证明是 要从诸如地面、卫星传感器的任何其它位置来回答 都极具挑战的问题 今天我想和大家分享其中的三个 第一个问题是 如何管理我们在热带雨林中的 碳储量? 热带雨林中的数目储存了大量的碳资源 如果我们想要避免全球继续变暖 就必须让这些碳存在树木中 而不幸的是:全球由于滥伐森林所导致的 碳排放量 目前已经赶得上全球运输行业 这可是所有船只、飞机、或者和汽车排放量的总和 所以可以理解那些政策谈判代表 一直致力于减少森林砍伐量 目前正在那些科学几乎未知的地域上 下功夫 如果你不能确切并详细的知道碳存在哪里 又怎么能知道你的损失? 最基本的,我们需要一个先进的会计系统 通过它我们可以非常细节的看到 热带雨林的碳存储量 红色显示,明显的,成片的热带雨林 然后你看到整齐的切口 黄色和绿色的森林切口 就像在切蛋糕 只不过这些蛋糕有鲸鱼那么深 不过我们可以放大 同时看到森林和树木 让我们非常惊奇的是 即便我们在森林上面飞得很高 但在后续分析中 我们可以走进森林,体验那些树梢 每一片叶子、每一根树枝 就像这个森林里的其它生物一样 体验这些与之共存的树木
We've been using the technology to explore and to actually put out the first carbon geographies in high resolution in faraway places like the Amazon Basin and not-so-faraway places like the United States and Central America. What I'm going to do is I'm going to take you on a high-resolution, first-time tour of the carbon landscapes of Peru and then Panama. The colors are going to be going from red to blue. Red is extremely high carbon stocks, your largest cathedral forests you can imagine, and blue are very low carbon stocks. And let me tell you, Peru alone is an amazing place, totally unknown in terms of its carbon geography until today. We can fly to this area in northern Peru and see super high carbon stocks in red, and the Amazon River and floodplain cutting right through it. We can go to an area of utter devastation caused by deforestation in blue, and the virus of deforestation spreading out in orange. We can also fly to the southern Andes to see the tree line and see exactly how the carbon geography ends as we go up into the mountain system. And we can go to the biggest swamp in the western Amazon. It's a watery dreamworld akin to Jim Cameron's "Avatar." We can go to one of the smallest tropical countries, Panama, and see also a huge range of carbon variation, from high in red to low in blue. Unfortunately, most of the carbon is lost in the lowlands, but what you see that's left, in terms of high carbon stocks in greens and reds, is the stuff that's up in the mountains. One interesting exception to this is right in the middle of your screen. You're seeing the buffer zone around the Panama Canal. That's in the reds and yellows. The canal authorities are using force to protect their watershed and global commerce. This kind of carbon mapping has transformed conservation and resource policy development. It's really advancing our ability to save forests and to curb climate change.
我们已经用这些技术进行过探索 用非常高的精度 实际刻画了第一片偏远地区的碳地貌 像亚马逊盆地 还有一些不是很偏远的地方,比如像 美国和中美洲 下面我将带大家领略一下 我们的首次秘鲁之行以及后来巴拿马的高精度碳地貌 颜色从红色到蓝色 红色标识着极高的碳存储量 你所能想象到的最大的森林 蓝色则是非常低的碳存储量 我想告诉大家的是 秘鲁真的是一个神奇的地方 它的碳地貌直到今天才被发现 我们飞到秘鲁北面的地区 看到了红色的那些超高碳存储量的地方 而亚马逊河和河漫滩 正好从它中间穿过 我们可以去那片蓝色的 因为过度砍伐而被彻底被毁坏的地区 而砍伐的诟病也正在向橘色的区域蔓延 我们也可以飞过南安第斯山脉 上升到山系 去看林木线以及 碳地貌是如何终止的 我们可以去亚马逊西部最大的湿地 这是一个奇妙的水世界 就像吉姆-卡梅伦的“阿凡达” 我们可以去最小的热带国家巴拿马 看看那片巨大的 由红到蓝 的碳变化范围 不幸的是绝大多数碳都在地底处丢失了 但是你可以看到余下的, 绿色和红色代表高碳储蓄, 是在山脉中 你可以看到屏幕正中间 有一个有趣的例外 你可以看到巴拿马运河周围的缓冲带 是红色和黄色的 运河当局动用力量 保护他们的水域以及全球贸易 这种碳测绘图 改变了 养护和资源政策的发展 它完全超出了我们 保护森林、抑制气候变化的能力
My second question: How do we prepare for climate change in a place like the Amazon rainforest? Let me tell you, I spend a lot of time in these places, and we're seeing the climate changing already. Temperatures are increasing, and what's really happening is we're getting a lot of droughts, recurring droughts. The 2010 mega-drought is shown here with red showing an area about the size of Western Europe. The Amazon was so dry in 2010 that even the main stem of the Amazon river itself dried up partially, as you see in the photo in the lower portion of the slide. What we found is that in very remote areas, these droughts are having a big negative impact on tropical forests. For example, these are all of the dead trees in red that suffered mortality following the 2010 drought. This area happens to be on the border of Peru and Brazil, totally unexplored, almost totally unknown scientifically.
我的第二个问题是 我们如何在一个类似亚马逊热带雨林的地方为应对气候变化做准备? 我想告诉大家的是我花了很多时间在这些地方 并且我们看到气候已经正在发生变化 温度在升高 我们看到干旱 正在反复发生 这里用红色显示了2010的大旱灾区域 面积抵得上整个西欧 2010年亚马逊非常干旱 就连它的干流 也部分干涸了 在幻灯片的下半部分你可以看到照片 我们发现在非常偏远的地区 旱灾对热带雨林 造成了巨大的负面影响 比如,那些红色的树木就是 继2010的大旱之后死亡的 这些区域是在 秘鲁和巴西的边界 完全没有开发过 科学上也几乎完全未知
So what we think, as Earth scientists, is species are going to have to migrate with climate change from the east in Brazil all the way west into the Andes and up into the mountains in order to minimize their exposure to climate change. One of the problems with this is that humans are taking apart the western Amazon as we speak. Look at this 100-square-kilometer gash in the forest created by gold miners. You see the forest in green in 3D, and you see the effects of gold mining down below the soil surface. Species have nowhere to migrate in a system like this, obviously.
作为地球学者,我们认为 生物一定会随着气候变化而迁徙 从巴西东部一直向西 到安第斯山脉 一直沿着山向上 这样才能减小他们所受的气候变化的影响 而其中的问题是人们 对亚马逊西部地区的粗暴行为 看看这个由黄金矿工们弄出的 100平方千米的森林裂缝吧 你看这片3D的绿色森林 以及黄金旷工在地面下 造成的破坏 显然,任何生物都不会迁徙到这样的生态系统中去
If you haven't been to the Amazon, you should go. It's an amazing experience every time, no matter where you go. You're going to probably see it this way, on a river. But what happens is a lot of times the rivers hide what's really going on back in the forest itself. We flew over this same river, imaged the system in 3D. The forest is on the left. And then we can digitally remove the forest and see what's going on below the canopy. And in this case, we found gold mining activity, all of it illegal, set back away from the river's edge, as you'll see in those strange pockmarks coming up on your screen on the right. Don't worry, we're working with the authorities to deal with this and many, many other problems in the region.
如果你还没有去过亚马逊,你真的该去看看 不管你去哪儿 每次都会有奇妙的经历 你可能会在河面上看它 但事实上很多时候 河流会把事实 隐藏在森林里面 我们飞过同一条河流 对这个生态系统进行3D成像 森林起初在左边 我们慢慢移动森林 观测天空下正在发生什么 我们看到了 有人在从事非法的挖金矿活动 就在河边上 因为从右边的图中 你能看到那些奇怪的凹坑 不同担心,我们会和当局一同合作 处理这个区域的 这个问题还有其他的一些问题
So in order to put together a conservation plan for these unique, important corridors like the western Amazon and the Andes Amazon corridor, we have to start making geographically explicit plans now. How do we do that if we don't know the geography of biodiversity in the region, if it's so unknown to science? So what we've been doing is using the laser-guided spectroscopy from the CAO to map for the first time the biodiversity of the Amazon rainforest. Here you see actual data showing different species in different colors. Reds are one type of species, blues are another, and greens are yet another. And when we take this together and scale up to the regional level, we get a completely new geography of biodiversity unknown prior to this work. This tells us where the big biodiversity changes occur from habitat to habitat, and that's really important because it tells us a lot about where species may migrate to and migrate from as the climate shifts. And this is the pivotal information that's needed by decision makers to develop protected areas in the context of their regional development plans.
为了组成一个保护计划 针对这些重要的奇特的地方 比如像西亚马逊、安第斯山亚马逊走廊 我们必须现在就开始 制定地理上的详细计划 而如果我们对这个区域的生物多样性地理图完全未知 我们怎么可能完成? 所以我们一直在致力于 通过CAO的激光制导光谱仪 完成对亚马逊热带雨林生物多样性的 首次成像 你现在看到的是用不同颜色表示不同物种的实际数据 红色是一种物种,蓝色也是一种 绿色是另一种 当我们把这些放在一起 扩展到区域级 就得到一个在这之前从未有过的 生物多样性地理图 它告诉我们从一个栖息地到另一个栖息地之间 生物多样性的巨大变化发生在哪里 这个非常重要 因为它可以告诉我们当气候突变的时候 生物迁徙的出发地和目的地 这是在区域开发计划中 决策者发展保护区时 所需的关键信息
And third and final question is, how do we manage biodiversity on a planet of protected ecosystems? The example I started out with about lions hunting, that was a study we did behind the fence line of a protected area in South Africa. And the truth is, much of Africa's nature is going to persist into the future in protected areas like I show in blue on the screen. This puts incredible pressure and responsibility on park management. They need to do and make decisions that will benefit all of the species that they're protecting. Some of their decisions have really big impacts. For example, how much and where to use fire as a management tool? Or, how to deal with a large species like elephants, which may, if their populations get too large, have a negative impact on the ecosystem and on other species. And let me tell you, these types of dynamics really play out on the landscape. In the foreground is an area with lots of fire and lots of elephants: wide open savanna in blue, and just a few trees. As we cross this fence line, now we're getting into an area that has had protection from fire and zero elephants: dense vegetation, a radically different ecosystem. And in a place like Kruger, the soaring elephant densities are a real problem. I know it's a sensitive issue for many of you, and there are no easy answers with this. But what's good is that the technology we've developed and we're working with in South Africa, for example, is allowing us to map every single tree in the savanna, and then through repeat flights we're able to see which trees are being pushed over by elephants, in the red as you see on the screen, and how much that's happening in different types of landscapes in the savanna. That's giving park managers a very first opportunity to use tactical management strategies that are more nuanced and don't lead to those extremes that I just showed you. So really, the way we're looking at protected areas nowadays is to think of it as tending to a circle of life, where we have fire management, elephant management, those impacts on the structure of the ecosystem, and then those impacts affecting everything from insects up to apex predators like lions.
第三个问题也是最后一个 在被保护的生态系统中 我们如何管理生物多样性? 一开始我提到的那个狮子捕猎的例子 就是我们在南非 一块保护区域的围栏后 所做的研究工作 事实上,南非的大自然很大程度上 将在未来成为保护地 就像我在屏幕上用蓝色标识的那样 这将对公园的管理造成 难以置信的压力和责任 他们所做的决策必须保证 对保护区内所有物种的保护 他们的一些决策的确会造成很大的影响 比如,用多大力度以及在哪里使用火力 作为他们的管理工具? 比如,如何管理大象之类的大型物种 如果它们的数目过于庞大 将会对生态系统和其它物种 造成负面的影响 我这么跟你说吧,这些不同的情况 在这片土地上真的发生过 这是一片有着大量火力 同时也有很多大象的地方 蓝色是一望无际的热带草原,树木很少 越过围栏,我们进入一片 有着火力保护 但没有大象的区域 这里植被茂盛,是一个完全不同的生态系统 在克鲁格之类的地方 大象密度的攀升 的确是个问题 这对你们当中的很多人是很敏感的话题 的确很难作答 值得欣慰的是我们开发的那些用在南非的技术 比如 可以使得我们对热带草原上的每一棵树进行成像 通过反反复复的飞行 我们能够 通过屏幕上的红色标识 看到那些被大象推倒了的树 以及这些在草原上的不同风景区发生到什么程度 这给公园管理员提供了 第一个制定精细化管理策略的机会 避免了极端事件的发生 就像我刚才展示的那些一样 事实上,我们今天看待 保护区域的方式 是把它看作是一个生生不息的生命循环 对火力进行管理、对大象进行管理 影响整个生态系统的结构 进而影响到每一个物种 从小小的昆虫
Going forward, I plan to greatly expand the airborne observatory. I'm hoping to actually put the technology into orbit so we can manage the entire planet with technologies like this. Until then, you're going to find me flying in some remote place that you've never heard of. I just want to end by saying that technology is absolutely critical to managing our planet, but even more important is the understanding and wisdom to apply it.
一直到食物链顶端的狮子 后续我在计划大力推广 这种空中天文台 我希望能把这项技术用到航天轨道中去 这样我们就可以 管理好整个地球 到那时你会发现我将在 很多你不曾听过的偏远地区飞行 最后,我想说的是 这项技术对管理我们的地球来说非常之关键 但更为重要的是 首先我们必须必须要有应用它的理解力和智慧
Thank you.
谢谢
(Applause)
(掌声)