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NASA NTRS2017

The Future of Evapotranspiration: Global Requirements for Ecosystem Functioning, Carbon and Climate Feedbacks, Agricultural Management, and Water Resources

The fate of the terrestrial biosphere is highly uncertain given recent and projected changes in climate. This is especially acute for impacts associated with changes in drought frequency and intensity on the distribution and timing of water availability. The development of effective adaptation strategies for these emerging threats to food and water security are compromised by limitations in our understanding of how natural and managed ecosystems are responding to changing hydrological and climatological regimes. This information gap is exacerbated by insufficient monitoring capabilities from local to global scales. Here, we describe how evapotranspiration (ET) represents the key variable in linking ecosystem functioning, carbon and climate feedbacks, agricultural management, and water resources, and highlight both the outstanding science and applications questions and the actions, especially from a space-based perspective, necessary to advance them.

Fisher, Joshua B.↗

NASA NTRS2014

NASA COAST and OCEANIA Airborne Missions Support Ecosystem and Water Quality Research in the Coastal Zone

NASA has a continuing requirement to collect high-quality in situ data for the vicarious calibration of current and next generation ocean color satellite sensors and to validate the algorithms that use the remotely sensed observations. Recent NASA airborne missions over Monterey Bay, CA, have demonstrated novel above- and in-water measurement capabilities supporting a combined airborne sensor approach (imaging spectrometer, microradiometers, and a sun photometer). The results characterize coastal atmospheric and aquatic properties through an end-to-end assessment of image acquisition, atmospheric correction, algorithm application, plus sea-truth observations from state-of-the-art instrument systems. The primary goal is to demonstrate the following in support of calibration and validation exercises for satellite coastal ocean color products: 1) the utility of a multi-sensor airborne instrument suite to assess the bio-optical properties of coastal California, including water quality; and 2) the importance of contemporaneous atmospheric measurements to improve atmospheric correction in the coastal zone. The imaging spectrometer (Headwall) is optimized in the blue spectral domain to emphasize remote sensing of marine and freshwater ecosystems. The novel airborne instrument, Coastal Airborne In-situ Radiometers (C-AIR) provides measurements of apparent optical properties with high dynamic range and fidelity for deriving exact water leaving radiances at the land-ocean boundary, including radiometrically shallow aquatic ecosystems. Simultaneous measurements supporting empirical atmospheric correction of image data are accomplished using the Ames Airborne Tracking Sunphotometer (AATS-14). Flight operations are presented for the instrument payloads using the Center for Interdisciplinary Remotely-Piloted Aircraft Studies (CIRPAS) Twin Otter flown over Monterey Bay during the seasonal fall algal bloom in 2011 (COAST) and 2013 (OCEANIA) to support bio-optical measurements of phytoplankton for coastal zone research.

Airborne Instruments↗

NASA NTRS2017

Assessing Ecosystem Service Provision Under Climate Change to Support Conservation and Development Planning in Myanmar

Inclusion of ecosystem services (ES) information into national-scale development and climate adaptation planning has yet to become common practice, despite demand from decision makers. Identifying where ES originate and to whom the benefits flowunder current and future climate conditionsis especially critical in rapidly developing countries, where the risk of ES loss is high. Here, using Myanmar as a case study, we assess where and how ecosystems provide key benefits to the countrys people and infrastructure. We model the supply of and demand for sediment retention, dry-season baseflows, flood risk reduction and coastal storm protection from multiple beneficiaries. We find that locations currently providing the greatest amount of services are likely to remain important under the range of climate conditions considered, demonstrating their importance in planning for climate resilience. Overlap between priority areas for ES provision and biodiversity conservation is higher than expected by chance overall, but the areas important for multiple ES are underrepresented in currently designated protected areas and Key Biodiversity Areas. Our results are contributing to development planning in Myanmar, and our approach could be extended to other contexts where there is demand for national-scale natural capital information to shape development plans and policies

Climate change↗

NASA NTRS2017

Adaptive Management Using Remote Sensing and Ecosystem Modeling in Response to Climate Variability and Invasive Aquatic Plants for the California Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta Water Resource

The California Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta is the hub for California's water supply and supports important ecosystem services, agriculture, and communities in Northern to Southern California. Expansion of invasive aquatic plants in the Delta coupled with impacts of changing climate and long-term drought is detrimental to the San Francisco Bay/California Delta complex. NASA Ames Research Center and the USDA-ARS partnered with the State of California to develop science-based, adaptive-management strategies for invasive aquatic plant in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Specific mapping tools developed utilizing satellite and airborne platforms provide regular assessments of population dynamics on a landscape scale and support both strategic planning and operational decision making for resource managers. San Joaquin and Sacramento River watersheds water quality input to the Delta is modeled using the Soil-Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) and a modified SWAT tool has been customized to account for unique landscape and management of agricultural water supply and drainage within the Delta. Environmental response models for growth of invasive aquatic weeds are being parameterized and coupled with spatial distribution/biomass density mapping and water quality to study ecosystem response to climate and aquatic plant management practices. On the water validation and operational utilization of these tools by management agencies and how they are improving decision making, management effectiveness and efficiency will be discussed. The project combines science, operations, and economics related to integrated management scenarios for aquatic weeds to help land and water resource managers make science-informed decisions regarding management and outcomes.

Adaptive↗

NASA NTRS2014

Cultivating an Emergent Earth Observation Analytics Ecosystem in the Cloud

A diverse set of data analytics systems for Earth Observations are sprouting up in the Earth Science community, with a wealth of processing algorithms and analysis methods. There is a similar wealth of data resources available via myriad data providers and clearinghouses, including large institutional systems like the Earth Observing System Data and Information System, Comprehensive Large Scale Array-data Stewardship System, and Federated Earth Observation Missions gateway. With Earth system science driving a need to work with more datasets together, and the community developing more analysis tools (some of them dataset-specific), how can we develop analysis workflows that incorporate far-flung datasets and leverage analysis resources from multiple organizations? Cloud computing points the way toward a solution in two different respects. Firstly, the access to and abstraction of virtually unlimited storage and computing power provides an environment that enables more straightforward means of pulling datasets and analysis resources together. Just as importantly, however, cloud computing serves as an example of an "ecosystem" of interoperating services, since the essence of cloud computing is the presentation of all resources as a service, from hardware to infrastructure to platform to software. This enables the combination of off-the-shelf, diverse services to construct entire systems that emerge out of an equally diverse community of architects and developers. This approach can be similarly applied to the data and analysis resources in the Earth Observation community. By exposing these resources via well understood services, and consuming resources in the same way, different organizations can construct bespoke analysis workflows and systems for their own purposes. The key leap the community needs to make is to develop analysis systems in components that interact with other components via services. The result would be a rich ecosystem of analytics components that can be combined to analyze datasets at scale and in conjunction with other datasets from other sources.

chaos↗

NASA NTRS2016

PLANT: Polarimetric-Interferometric Lab and Analysis Tools for Ecosystem and Land-Cover Science and Applications

PLANT (Polarimetric-interferometric Lab and Analysis Tools) is a new collection of software tools developed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to support processing and analysis of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data for ecosystem and land-cover/land-use change science and applications. PLANT inherits code components from the Interferometric Scientific Computing Environment (ISCE) to generate highresolution, coregistered polarimetric-interferometric SLC stacks from Level-0/1 data for a variety of airborne and spaceborne sensors. The goal is to provide the ecosystem and land-cover/land-use change communities with rigorous and efficient tools to perform multi-temporal, polarimetric and tomographic analyses in order to generate calibrated, geocoded and mosaicked Level-2 and Level-3 products (e.g.,maps of above-ground biomass and forest disturbance). In this paper we introduce the capabilities of PLANT and report first results obtained with the tools developed up to date.

Lavalle, Marco↗

NASA NTRS2019

Utilizing Satellite Based Observations and Physical Hydrological Modeling for Freshwater Ecosystem Health in the Lower Mekong River Basin

Freshwater availability is necessary to promote economic growth through agriculture, fisheries, transport, environmental health, and social equity.The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Conservation International (CI) are partnering to use remote sensing Earth observations to improve regional efforts that assess natural resources for conservation and sustainable management. (Vollmer et al.,2018) have presented the social-ecological framework named the Freshwater Health Index (FHI), which takes account of the interplay between governance, stakeholders, freshwater ecosystems and the ecosystem services they provide.In this work, we develop decision support and making tools for natural resources conservation in the Lower Mekong by leveraging the FHI framework, multiple data products, and hydrological modeling capabilities (Mohammed et al., 2018). Modeling capabilities enable the integration of satellite-based daily gridded precipitation, air temperature, digital elevation model, soil characteristics, and land cover and land use information to simulate water flux framework.

Mohammed, Ibrahim N.↗

NASA NTRS2020

The Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation: High-Resolution Laser Ranging of the Earth’s Forests and Topography

Obtaining accurate and widespread measurements of the vertical structure of the Earth’s forests has been a longsought goal for the ecological community. Such observations are critical for accurately assessing the existing biomass of forests, and how changes in this biomass caused by human activities or variations in climate may impact atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Additionally, the three-dimensional structure of forests is a key component of habitat quality and biodiversity at local to regional scales. The Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) was launched to the International Space Station in late 2018 to provide high-quality measurements of forest vertical structure in temperate and tropical forests between 51.6 N & S latitude. The GEDI instrument is a geodetic-class laser altimeter/waveform lidar comprised of 3 lasers that produce 8 transects of structural information. Over its two-year nominal lifetime GEDI is anticipated to provide over 10 billion waveforms at a footprint resolution of 25 m. These data will be used to derive a variety of footprint and gridded products, including canopy height, canopy foliar profiles, Leaf Area Index (LAI), sub-canopy topography and biomass. Additionally, data from GEDI are used to demonstrate the efficacy of its measurements for prognostic ecosystem modeling, habit and biodiversity studies, and for fusion using radar and other remote sensing instruments. GEDI science and technology are unique: no other space-based mission has been created that is specifically optimized for retrieving vegetation vertical structure. As such, GEDI promises to advance our understanding of the importance of canopy vertical variations within an ecological paradigm based on structure, composition and function.

Dubayah, Ralph↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Going With the Flow: Using a Particle Dispersion Model to Reveal Links Between Ocean Ecosystems and Marine Aerosols

Marine biogenic particle contributions to atmospheric aerosol concentrations are not well understood though they are important for determining cloud optical and cloud nucleating properties. Here we examine the relationship between marine aerosol measurements with satellite and model fields of ocean biology and meteorological variables during the North Atlantic Aerosols and Marine Ecosystems Study (NAAMES). NAAMES consisted of four field campaigns between November 2015 and April 2018 that aligned with the four major phases of the annual phytoplankton bloom cycle. The FLEXPART Lagrangian particle dispersion model is used to connect these variables spatiotemporally to ship-based aerosol. We find that correlations between some aerosol measurements with satellite measured and modelled variables increase with increasing trajectory length. This indicates biological and meteorological processes over the air mass history are influential to measured particle properties. For example, results show organic aerosol mass is driven by biogenic volatile organic compound (VOC) emissions from photosynthesis by phytoplankton stocks during advection into the region. In contrast, primary marine aerosol (PMA) concentrations showed better correlations to variables weighted with shorter air mass residence times, which reflects their localized origin as primary emissions. Evidence also suggest variability in PMA concentrations likely play an important role in VOC emission removal. The removal of VOCs lessen their impact on particle number and mass concentrations. The sensitivity of marine aerosols to the main ecosystem-atmosphere drivers and its dependence on air mass history are to be further discussed.

Kevin J Sanchez↗

NASA NTRS2020

The “Gearamid” Model: Transforming NASA Langley’s Role in the Aerospace Technology Ecosystem

NASA’s operating environment is evolving: numerous new emerging technologies are converging to create breakthrough solutions, many nontraditional players are partnering to create those solutions, and a diverse array of new public-private funding models are being employed. A team at NASA’s Langley Research Center (LaRC) developed a model to describe the challenges that must be addressed for an emerging breakthrough technology to penetrate the appropriate market sector, and how all the players in the relevant ecosystem can collaborate to accelerate the market infusion process. This model, which the team dubbed the “Gearamid,” originated from a narrower study to determine what LaRC should do to capitalize on and advance autonomous technology as a “game changer” in the civil aerospace domain. The elements in the original version of the Gearamid depict the various challenges that need to be addressed as an autonomous technology proceeds from initial development to market infusion. In addition, the Gearamid indicates the “actors” best suited to address each challenge element. The study team noted that all challenge elements in the Gearamid must be worked concurrently to assure successful infusion of autonomous solutions. The team also found that NASA expertise naturally positions Agency organizations—including LaRC—to lead contributions that address certain challenge elements and to play a supplemental role in other areas where entities external to NASA are actively working and investing to solve challenges. Furthermore, the team concluded that NASA can play a leadership role in coordinating efforts of the diverse entities across the civil aerospace community. After determining the center’s optimal role in the autonomous technology development ecosystem, the study team then extrapolated the Gearamid model for autonomous technologies into a broader, more general model depicting the challenge elements that must be overcome to develop and infuse any emerging technology. LaRC has embraced the Gearamid model and is using it to drive changes that will transform the center and allow it to function optimally in the evolving landscape. Given LaRC’s successes, the study team suggests that other organizations may also be able to use the Gearamid model to inform future planning/strategy efforts.

Jill M Marlowe↗

NASA NTRS2021

Development of an Additive Manufacturing Ecosystem for Qualification of Additive Manufacturing Processes and Materials in Aviation

The major challenges associated with additive manufacturing (AM) are an ability to qualify parts and the costs associated with the technology. Our team will study and mature technologies as detailed below to develop an ecosystem for the qualification of AM machines, which in turn supports the certification of part production. Additive manufacturing offers unique opportunities for the aviation industry in the fabrication of original components and replacement parts. Aggressive use of metals AM has, for example, allowed the rapid development and production of new launch vehicle designs, at substantially reduced costs. Aviation has unique challenges, such as higher production volumes, but the potential value of integrating AM into aviation manufacturing is clear. To implement the ecosystem for AM qualification, the team will run a set of six multi-disciplinary projects. Each of these projects will address a current barrier to AM process qualification, and efficient production.

Koushik Datta↗

NASA NTRS2019

Satellite‐Detected Ocean Ecosystem Response to Volcanic Eruptions in the Subarctic Northeast Pacific Ocean

Volcanic eruptions in the Aleutian Archipelago during the summer of 2008 deposited large quantities of iron‐laden ash to the subarctic North Pacific Ocean. The surface ocean ecosystem response has been previously characterized using limited in situ and autonomous field measurements and numerical modeling, but basin‐scale satellite remote sensing has been limited to a simple description of chlorophyll variability. Here, we show that the ecosystem response is a complex combination of phytoplankton biomass and physiology that can be described with satellite ocean color diagnostics such as the chlorophyll‐to‐carbon biomass ratio (Chl:Cphyto) and chlorophyll fluorescence yield. Together, these quantities outline a more complete picture of ecological responses spanning unique signals of iron stress (and relief from), photo acclimation, changes in phytoplankton growth rate, increases in biomass, and timescales of decay for these processes.

T.K. Westberry↗

NASA NTRS2021

Coastal California Water Resources: Assessing Estuarine Ecosystems in California for Improved Wetland Monitoring and Management

Estuaries are vital ecosystems that serve important ecological functions. The Marine Life Protection Act aims to protect these ecosystems by establishing a network of marine protected areas (MPAs), in part by requiring regulatory agencies to monitor estuary extent and health. However, California has 23 estuarine MPAs (EMPAs) and approximately 440,000 total acres of estuarine habitat and, therefore, ground-based data collection can be time and resource intensive. This project used remotely sensed data to examine the health of California EMPAs in an effort to supplement ground-based field measurements. Specifically using Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI), Sentinel-2 MultiSpectral Instrument (MSI), and Sentinel-1 C-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (C-SAR), this project assessed mouth state, inundation extent, turbidity, Chlorophyll-a, and colored dissolved organic matter (CDOM) for estuaries observable with these sensors. The Normalized Water Difference Index (NDWI) from Sentinel-2 MSI was capable of capturing estuary mouth state and inundation extent. Meanwhile, Landsat 8 OLI and Sentinel-2 MSI indicated a capacity to capture differences in water quality metrics coinciding with changes to estuary mouth state using algorithms applied in Google Earth Engine (GEE). The GEE California Estuary Assessment (CEA) tools will allow project partners to better monitor and understand estuarine dynamics and health.

Karina Alvarez↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Building Capacity to Use Earth Observations for Ecosystem Services & Biodiversity Applications: A Summary of NASA’s DEVELOP Program and Projects in Central and South America

NASA’s DEVELOP program engages individuals and organizations in 10-week feasibility studies to apply NASA Earth observations (EO) to decision makers’ needs. Since 2018, DEVELOP conducted 21 projects in Central and South America, eight of those in collaboration with Sistema de la Integración Centroamericana (SICA) and its member state partner agencies. These projects addressed a diverse set of community needs across multiple themes, including 11 addressing issues related to biodiversity and ecosystem services that utilized a suite of EO to measure and monitor deforestation, habitat suitability, and land change impacts on watershed health in Peru, Costa Rica, Panama, Honduras, and Colombia. This poster introduces DEVELOP, its approach to capacity building, key partnerships, and project results highlighting the capabilities of EO for enhanced decision making in the area of ecosystem services and biodiversity.

Capacity Building↗

NASA NTRS2021

Tonlé Sap Food Security and Agriculture II: Evaluating Changes in Ecosystem Vitality and Freshwater Healthin the Tonlé Sap Basin using Remotely Sensed Data

The Tonlé Sap Lake and river basin in central Cambodia provide critical ecosystem services to the region, including fisheries, agricultural irrigation, hydropower, and biodiverse habitats. Deforestation, increased pumping for farming, and effects of climate change such as droughts and forest fires threaten the health of the lake and food security in the region. This project built upon the previous term through a partnership with Conservation International (CI), the Cambodian Ministry of Water Resources and Meteorology, and the Tonlé Sap Authority to assess ecosystem vitality and implement CI’s Freshwater Health Index (FHI) tool, in an effort to prioritize resource expenditure and highlight areas of concern. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and related travel restrictions, partners had not been able to readily collect in situ data for the past year, which make up the majority of FHI inputs. To help fill this data gap, we developed a methodology for using Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite data to calculate groundwater storage depletion, and a Python Application Programming Interface for processing and formatting remotely-sensed data for the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model. We then used SWAT to model nutrient flows and of phosphorous, nitrogen and suspended sediments amounts in the basin from October 2000 to December 2020. These outputs served as inputs for the FHI and provided policy makers with robust monitoring information to aid decision-making in the area and safeguard the lake’s vital fisheries and biodiversity.

Justine Spore↗

NASA NTRS2021

Canopy reflectance models illustrate varying NDVI responses to change in high latitude ecosystems

Multiyear trends in Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) have been used as metrics of high latitude ecosystem change based on the assumption that NDVI change is associated with ecological change, generally as changes in green vegetation amount (green leaf area index [LAI] or plant cover). Further, no change in NDVI is often interpreted as no change in these variables. Three canopy reflectance models including linear mixture model, the SAIL (Scattering from Arbitrarily Inclined Leaves) model, and the GeoSail model were used to simulate scenarios representing high latitude landscape NDVI responses to changes in LAI and plant cover. The simulations showed inconsistent NDVI responses. Clear increases in NDVI are generally associated with increases in LAI and plant cover. At higher values of LAI, the change in NDVI per unit change in LAI decreases, with very little change in spruce forest NDVI where crown cover is >50% and at the tundra–taiga ecotone with transitions from shrub tundra to spruce woodland. These lower responses may bias the interpretation of greening/browning trends in boreal forests. Variations in water or snow coverage were shown to produce outsized nonbiological NDVI responses. Inconsistencies in NDVI responses exemplify the need for care in the interpretation of NDVI change as a metric of high latitude ecosystem change, and that landscape characteristics in terms of the type of cover and its characteristics, such as the initial plant cover, must be taken into account in evaluating the significance of any observed NDVI trends.

Karl F Huemmrich↗

NASA NTRS2022

The Marine Biodiversity Observation Network Plankton Workshops: Plankton Ecosystem Function, Biodiversity, and Forecasting—Research Requirements and Applications

Plankton functional diversity is at the core of various ecological processes, including productivity, carbon cycling and sequestration, nutrient cycling, interspecies interactions, food web dynamics and structure. Through these functions, plankton play a critical role in the health of the coastal and open ocean and provide essential ecosystem services. Yet, at present, our understanding of plankton dynamics is insufficient to project how climate change and other human-driven impacts affect the functional diversity of plankton. That limits our ability to predict how critical ecosystem services will change in the future and develop strategies to adapt to these changes.

Plankton↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA) for a Robust Commercial Lunar Ecosystem

Modular Open Systems Approaches (MOSAs) have been adopted worldwide to solve a myriad of challenges. Open systems by their nature maximize accessibility, reduce barriers to entry, and prevent vendor lock. Similarly, modularity speeds innovation, fosters design re-use, and enables incremental development & growth. Architectures developed using a MOSA synergize the benefits of modularity and open systems to produce better products at lower developmental cost and risk, saving the consumer money while allowing greater developer profit margins. Specific to the challenge of lunar exploration, a MOSA will ensure interoperability among diverse commercial, government, and international partners. Complex spaceflight systems can be assembled, upgraded, and serviced far more easily and with greater commercial involvement with the use of a MOSA. By allowing partners to self-limit their scope to key strengths, they can focus on producing premier components without carrying the high risk and associated cost of auxiliary tasks they don’t specialize in. We survey commercial and Department of Defense (DoD) lessons learned in past decades, discuss DoD robotics’ experience in Iraq and Afghanistan (first without then with MOSAs), and analyze the flourishing commercial ecosystem that has resulted from DoD MOSA adoption. We explore the future of lunar operations to demonstrate the criticality of MOSA adoption in key areas at the right time. Two specific lunar technical fields are studied as examples: Power and In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU). Finally, recognizing that the lunar ISRU campaign will be an eminently collaborative operation requiring seamless partnering among diverse commercial, government, and international partners, a comprehensive technology development ecosystem is explored aimed at enabling ISRU in a way that systems and components are affordable for commercial partners to design, build, and sustain.

Mathew DeMinico↗