Lasers and airplanes help scientists combat invasive species

Summary: This article and video describe a massive new effort called the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON). The goal is to answer some big questions of human impact on the natural world. This effort will also monitor the health of environments around the country. Members of this project are looking for land-use change, invasive species change, or any long term change. This project will use high-tech equipment to collect data from the air and the ground at sites all over the country. The scientists will be able to track what's happening to different environments over a long period of time. Over the next few years, this project will begin to fly data collecting planes all over the country for the next 30 years. But these planes are more than your normal planes. These planes have high resolution cameras, lasers, and an imaging spectrometer built by NASA. The laser can detect the height of trees and the imaging spectrometer can detect the health of the canopy. The imaging spectrometer can also differentiate from dead vegetation, live vegetation, soil, and man made structures. From the data collected by the planes, scientists will be able to come up with a species map. It will tell what trees are out there and when certain trees are under stress like if there is a drought or if there are invasive species. The information can be accessed by the public for looking at land changes and the spread of invasive species. With this knowledge, people will know exactly where invasive species are and what actions to take. The NEON project is expected to be fully running in 60 different spots around the US within 5 years.

Relevance: This article relates to our studies in ecosystems and more specifically, invasive species. We learned about the ecological impacts invasive species have, and this article talks about  fighting invasive species using high-tech technology.

Marie Cusick
August 20, 2012
http://innovationtrail.org/term/rit