Aug. 10, 2026 — Zooming from her workplace, Michigan State University (MSU) researcher Kelly Kapsar confirmed off beautiful satellite tv for pc photos from throughout the USA.
In some, totally different colours revealed the exact heights of the forested ridges within the Sierra Nevada or the craggy peaks of the Rockies and the valleys between them. Others confirmed the pine flatwoods of southern Florida or the graceful rolling grasslands of the Kansas prairie.
In a brand new examine, researchers present measures of elevation and local weather round 47 websites within the U.S. Nationwide Ecological Observatory Community, from Florida’s Everglades to the Alaskan tundra a whole lot of miles above the Arctic Circle. Courtesy of Kelly Kapsar.
The pictures have been taken by the house shuttle Endeavor throughout a 2000 mission to make detailed radar maps of the planet’s floor.
Endeavour orbited Earth 16 instances a day throughout the 11-day mission. In that point, it took greater than a trillion elevation measurements, producing a whopping 12.3 terabytes of knowledge.
Since then, different Earth-observing satellites have measured issues like temperature, rainfall, sea ranges, carbon dioxide, snow cowl, wind speeds, even mud — and at scales starting from the span of a continent to patches barely bigger than a tennis courtroom.
It’s a treasure trove of knowledge. And by combining this data captured from house with measurements of vegetation and animals taken on the bottom, researchers hope to higher predict the place species are most probably to thrive within the years to come back, stated professor Phoebe Zarnetske, who directs MSU’s Spatial and Community Ecology, or SpaCE, Lab.
However there’s a hitch, stated Kapsar, a postdoctoral affiliate within the SpaCE Lab.
Whereas plenty of satellite tv for pc distant sensing knowledge is publicly accessible, for a lot of researchers, making the most of it isn’t simple.
“We’ve got a lot satellite-based knowledge now, however ecologists obtain little or no coaching on the right way to work with it,” Kapsar stated. “When you begin downloading satellite tv for pc knowledge, it will get into a whole lot of gigabytes and hundreds of layers.”
That usually requires technical experience in supercomputing and massive knowledge evaluation to course of.
There’s one other drawback, Kapsar added. The statistical fashions that scientists use to map the place vegetation and animals are more likely to reside typically require a single, numerical worth to characterize the setting. However from the attitude of, say, a vole or a beetle, summarizing a panorama in only one quantity doesn’t inform the entire story.
As an instance, Kapsar pulled up a collection of satellite tv for pc photos exhibiting the contours of the land round websites throughout the National Ecological Observatory Network, or NEON, a 30-year analysis effort to observe adjustments at 81 discipline websites throughout the U.S.
One NEON discipline website throughout the Sierra Nevada mountain vary in California has a mean elevation of seven,050 toes. Nonetheless, this quantity masks plenty of ups and downs, from towering 10,000-foot mountain peaks to valleys and meadows.
The identical holds true in the case of rainfall, Kapsar stated. Whereas annual precipitation in a NEON website close to Las Cruces, New Mexico, within the northern Chihuahuan Desert stays fairly constant round 11 inches a 12 months, rainfall at a website in Hawaii can differ drastically 12 months to 12 months — from 80 inches to 160 inches.
Also called “geodiversity,” this heterogeneity within the setting can imply so much to the vegetation and animals that reside there.
“If you consider the world like many animals do, they’re not going to simply take the typical of a mountain panorama,” Kapsar stated. “They need to take care of issues like: How steep is that this cliff? Can I climb it? What number of ups and downs are there? How bumpy is the terrain? Are there locations for me to cover?”
“The temperature and precipitation inside an space can differ with the topography and vegetation to provide microclimates, the place solely sure species can thrive,” stated co-author Lala Kounta, a local weather scientist within the SpaCE Lab.
Kapsar, Kounta, Zarnetske and collaborators are engaged on methods to offer geodiversity knowledge to researchers and assist shut the hole.
Crunching huge quantities of satellite tv for pc knowledge with the MSU Excessive Efficiency Computing Middle in a brand new examine, they hand over a set of local weather and elevation geodiversity metrics that seize extra than simply the imply so researchers working at NEON websites throughout the U.S. can use them.
Initially developed for the sector of floor metrology, the metrics embrace statistical measures of how “tough” or “easy” precipitation, temperature and elevation are throughout the panorama, calculated utilizing an open-source laptop program that Zarnetske and MSU’s Kyla Dahlin and colleagues developed known as GEODIV.
Their paper additionally affords a how-to for researchers who wish to use satellite tv for pc knowledge to seize this complexity at different websites around the globe and at totally different scales.
“The concept is to take the satellite tv for pc’s perspective from means up excessive within the sky, and NEON’s intensive knowledge assortment on the bottom — catching bugs, listening for birds, sampling vegetation — and produce them collectively to get the perfect of each worlds,” Kapsar stated.
Source: Robin Smith, MSU
