January 18, 2025
Dr. Xiaowei Jia, an assistant professor with the Department of Computer Science, and fellow researchers have been awarded $300,000 for the research project "A Digital Twin Integrating Knowledge and AI for Understanding Carbon and Biodiversity Corridors in Central America".
Jia serves the project's co-PI, alongside Yiqun Xie of the University of Maryland, College Park, the project's PI. Their research is one of 25 projects awarded NASA's Advanced Information Systems Technology (AIST) Program.
Home to the world’s second-largest contiguous rainforest, Central Africa is a crucial land carbon reservoir and the major habitat of thousands of endemic species of plants and wildlife. Past decades of land use activities have threatened Central Africa, resulting in the loss of millions of hectares of humid primary forest and fragmented landscapes. Carbon and biodiversity corridors, connecting protected habitats across landscapes, can mitigate the effects of land use and climate change on biodiversity and enhance carbon storage capacity. Identifying and managing these corridors requires scientific understanding and technical tools to assess the current conditions of carbon storage and biodiversity, along with the vulnerability to climate change, land use change, resource exploitation, and wildfires in the future.
This project aims to build a digital twin of carbon and biodiversity corridors in Central Africa by integrating knowledge-based models and AI to enable detailed analysis of the current status and future forecasts at high resolution under a broad spectrum of scenarios. To achieve this, several research gaps and challenges need to be addressed. First, most existing high-resolution forest maps derived from remote sensing products focus on the spatial extent of forests but do not accurately reflect their carbon status due to misalignments between optical signals and height structures, leading to inaccurate carbon estimates.
Please join us in congratulating Dr. Jia and his collaborators!