Gregory P. Asner is an American ecologist whose global work has focused on ecosystems, conservation, and climate sciences. He has developed technology to access and analyze large amounts of data about ecosystems, including assessing carbon emissions, coral reef resilience, and biodiversity. He is the founder of the Global Airborne Observatory (GAO, formerly the Carnegie Airborne Observatory, or CAO) and the creator of Carnegie Landsat Analysis System (CLAS) and CLASlite. Since 2019, he has been the Director of Arizona State University's Center for Global Discovery and Conservation Science. He is also managing director of the Allen Coral Atlas, an online map of all the coral reefs in the world used as a reference for reef conservation.
Asner's work mapping forests and coral reefs using airplanes and satellites influenced environmental policy decisions in several countries. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a 2017 Heinz Award recipient.
Early career
Asner grew up in Maryland, then earned an undergraduate degree in engineering and moved to Hawaii. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he was a deep-sea diver in the United States Navy, an experience that initiated his career in ecology. He worked for the nonprofit The Nature Conservancy in Hawaii in the early 1990s. As a result of his work there, he published his first scientific paper, assessing damage done to forests in Kaua'i after Hurricane Iniki in 1992. After his early experiences collecting ecological data in Hawaii, he began working on ways to measure human impacts on ecosystems around the world.
In 1996, NASA selected Asner, then a student at University of Colorado Boulder, as a recipient of one of its Earth System Science Graduate Student Fellowships. He earned his Ph.D. in biology in 1997. Subsequently, he turned his focus to creating better ways to gather data about the status of natural resources. In 1999, Asner began working on CLAS, a new system to map the effects of logging on rainforests. , Asner's team had provided CLASlite, the successor to CLAS, to 5,000 scientists in 137 countries for free in order to assist in collecting data about forest health and inform conservation decisions.
Asner moved his laboratory and research program from the University of Colorado to the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology in 2001. In addition to the airborne CAO – which officially launched in 2006 – the team collected ecological data using satellite sensors and computer modeling.
In 2005, after nearly a decade of research, Asner published a study of logging in the Amazon rainforest demonstrating that "selective logging" is often as harmful to ecosystems as clear-cutting. That same year, he and Peter Vitousek published research showing early indicators of an invasive species of tree growing in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. Popular Science named Asner to its annual "Brilliant Ten" list in 2007.
Work mapping forests and coral reefs
Asner led the team that developed, over the course of 15 years, Airborne Taxonomic Mapping System (AToMS), an advanced technology that uses sensors in a Dornier 228 airplane to map the Earth. AToMS uses spectrometers, lasers, and other tools to generate three-dimensional models of forests. With this technology the GAO can analyze the components of trees' foliage in order to identify which species make up different parts of forests. This granular data helps governments make decisions to protect biodiversity and reduce carbon footprints. For example, maps he has created have guided decisions about creating new national parks in Peru and supporting lion habitats in South Africa. His data has also shown that the Amazon contains 36 types of forest, a level of variation not previously understood. By 2019, Asner and his wife Robin Martin have identified the "spectral signatures" of half of the world's 60,000 tree species.
Throughout his career, Asner has worked to make his research accessible to government leaders and other people in positions of power. His work has influenced conservation policy decisions in the United States, South America and Southeast Asia. He has worked with multiple countries to help measure the carbon locked in their forests. In 2009, he used lidar to map the carbon in of Peruvian Amazon and provided the results to the Peruvian government. In 2013, his data highlighted the environmental impact of gold mining and deforestation in Peru. Also in 2013, he and the CAO team contributed data to a carbon map of the entirety of Panama, the first time a whole country had been mapped in that way.