Because carbon dioxide gas helps to warm our world, scientists want to better understand where carbon dioxide comes from and where it goes. Plants play an important role in the movements of carbon dioxide throughout Earth’s environment. Living plants both take in carbon dioxide from the air and put out carbon dioxide to the air. So scientists use satellites to measure the difference between how much carbon dioxide is taken in by plants compared to how much is put out by them. This difference is total amount of carbon dioxide taken in by plants, called net primary productivity. The maps here show plants’ net primary productivity for the whole globe.
These data currently include monthly composites from January 2007 to present; data from earlier years of the Terra mission will be added as they are reprocessed.
