Eric Bastos Gorgens is a forestry engineering professor at Brazil’s Federal University of Jequitinhonha and Mucuri Valleys. As he and colleagues studied data from satellites about the Amazon forest, something strange caught his eye.
At first it was just a set of numbers on a screen that let the researchers know giants were growing in the Parú State Forest conservation area in the state of Pará. It took time and dedication to figure what the height measurements represented.
“It could have been a bird flying by, a tower, a sensor error,” says Gorgens, the lead author of a recent study about the trees published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. “So we started to look into what could have given us these numbers that were so far from standard. And as we started looking at the data more carefully, we realized they weren’t errors. They were, in fact, giant trees.”
So Gorgens and his team had to go find those trees, of the species Dinizia excelsa, that grew to 80 meters (260 feet) and beyond. The journey was difficult, but they found the grove of giant trees. The very tallest, at 88.5 meters (290 feet) was inaccessible, but a return trip is planned for next year. Read about the Amazon giants, how they were found, and what it means, at Smithsonian.
(Image credit: Gorgens)