director greg asner flew the one of a kind laboratory in the sky over the peruvian rainforest. his goal -to create a revolutionary new map of peru - one that shows how much carbon the country sequesters - and where it's stored. he showed off some of his work to techknow's marita davison. >> trees are the best storage units of this thing called carbon. trees take up carbon dioxide and they store the carbon out of the carbon dioxide into their tissues. >> this is how a stretch of the peruvian rainforest appears from the plane to the naked eye. but this is how the observatory's unique 3-d laser imaging system sees the forest. >> what size of an area are we looking at here? >> this is two and a half three acres. >> and this is what you use to calculate say carbon stocks? >> ya, this is critical to understanding how much carbon is stored in the forest because the principal determinant is the volume of the forest. >> this map shows peru's carbon geography. the areas in red store the most carbon. one of the most carbon dense regions of peru is madre de dios. >> now, if carbon its not

. >> for over a decade, ecologist greg asner has been monitoring the health of forests around the world in an aircraft called the carnegie airborne observatory. techknow first profiled his work mapping the amazon in a previous episode this time, we joined him on his latest effort; to map drought- plagued california forests in his tricked out dornier 228. >> in the back of the aircraft are unique sensors designed to take measurements of the forest canopy while the plane flies over it. >> we're flying over about 8 million trees per hour. >> one of these instruments is known as lidar. this instrument is a laser system that fires two lasers out of the bottom of the plane in a pattern that images the forest canopy or whatever it is that we fly over, in 3d. what the instruments do is provide us a very accurate, very unique way of understanding the amount of carbon stored in california's forests. if you don't put carbon in forests, then it ends up in the atmosphere and that contributes to climate change. >> the plane is also equipped with a pair of spectrometers used to detect the chemical com