This theme reflects a key component of the sizeable effort to use earth-observation data to understand, and eventually balance, the Earth's carbon budget. With the signing of the Kyoto protocol in 1997, information on the carbon cycle now has policy as well as scientific implications. The major goal for this theme is to quantify net primary productivity of forests, which means combining satellite data with ecosystem process models. The approach is shown schematically in Figure 5.

Figure 5: Forest Biophysical Processes

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