Remote Sensing Biodiversity

Project title: Remote sensing of biodiversity across trophic levels

Fostering healthy biodiversity is our strongest natural defense against the negative impacts of global change, as diverse ecosystems sequester more CO2 and maintain ecosystem functions better than impoverished ones. However, most conservation, restoration, and ecosystem management projects rely on field surveys to track the progress of their efforts. This needs to change, as only consistent, continuous, and repeated information on biodiversity and ecosystem health will allow identifying the best conservation, restoration, and management practices and counteracting negative effects of ecosystem change in due time. Previous research has shown that biodiversity metrics developed from proximal and airborne imaging spectroscopy provide indicators for plant diversity at the individual and plant community scale. However, the degree to which these remotely sensed diversity metrics translate to satellite systems, and in how far they can capture the diversity of other trophic levels and at which scale remains underexplored. EMIT (NASA’ Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation) allows us to test and further develop algorithms for biodiversity assessments across ecosystems and trophic levels. The proposed project will improve our understanding of Earth’s ecosystems and biodiversity and will contribute to answering key questions, such as: Which aspects of biodiversity can be captured by which sensors and at which spatial scale? This information will be important for future NASA missions, including SBG (Surface Biology and Geomorphology). Overall, this project will provide critical information on the remote detectability of biodiversity across ecosystem, biological, spatial, and temporal scales, which is critical for global biodiversity assessments and for providing consistent indicators for biodiversity protection, restoration, and management.

Project Team

	Anna Schweiger
	Assistant Professor, Montana State University	nna.schweiger@montana.edu www.schweigerlab.com
	Ceili DeMarais
	Graduate Student	Montana State University
	Madelyn Zack
	Graduate Student	Montana State University
	Raqib Valli
	Graduate Student	Montana State University