New Sensor will Improve Rainforest Mapping
earth observation, natural resources, sensor web January 6th, 2009The Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology was recently awarded a $5.2-million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to fund instrument development to better monitor and explore tropical rainforests. Carnegie has created a Spectranomics Project to develop High-fidelity Imaging Spectroscopy (HiFIS) that will improve the instrumentation already aboard the Carnegie Airborne Observatory (CAO). The new sensor will be developed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and integrated with the existing Carnegie LiDAR system to create the Airborne Taxonomic Mapping System, or AToMS.
“We have limited understanding of the composition and function of these forests and how they are responding to clearing, invasive plants, climate change, and other threats. The Carnegie Spectranomics Project can determine the chemical and structural properties and even the diversity of species in unprecedented detail over broad swaths of rainforests from aircraft.”
The Carnegie Airborne Observatory uses waveform LiDAR (light detection and ranging) system that maps the 3-dimensional structure of vegetation and combines it with spectroscopic imaging. By analyzing many wavelengths of reflected light, this imaging reveals a forest’s biochemistry in 3D maps. The Carnegie Spectranomics Project plans to map rainforests in Africa, Southeast Asia, Amazonia, the Caribbean, and the western Pacific.
The team is also constructing a database of plant chemical fingerprints by collecting plants on the ground and calibrating their chemistry with spectroscopic measurements from the air to establish a library of thousands of individual species. For more information about the Carnegie Airborne Observatory and the Spectranomics Project see http://spectranomics.ciw.edu/
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January 12th, 2009 at 3:33 pm
[...] Asner said he hopes to see more technology like the sensors developed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Carnegie. Those sensors use waveform LiDAR (light detection and ranging) to create a 3D map of a forest that can detect when anything changes. [...]