While rangelands and NASA may seem like an unlikely pair, Lara Prihodko, a college associate professor of animal and range sciences at New Mexico State University, is currently working on two projects featuring the collaboration. Prihodko and other researchers from NMSU’s College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences have turned to satellites to learn more about Earth’s vegetation.
From an article in Las Cruces Sun News by Tiffany Acosta.
With the ICESat-2 Science Program, which is part of NASA’s Earth Observing Mission, the NMSU team is interested in measurements of woody plants such as shrubs and trees.
“It sounds counterintuitive that a satellite called ICESat-2 that was built to measure ice in the polar regions would be something we would use for rangeland analysis and monitoring,” Prihodko said. “However, ICESat-2 is what we call a photon-counting LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) that can measure the precise height of not only the ice or soil surface but also the trees and shrubs growing on the soil. It can be very difficult to measure the low stature, sparse vegetation you find in environments like ours from space, and so our research team, the Savanna Lab, is working to improve those measurements from ICESat-2.
Prihodko also is working to measure tree height using a waveform LiDAR on the International Space Station, a collaboration with Qiuyan Yu, a research assistant professor in the Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences and lead scientist on the Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation project. They want to understand the limiting factors for tree height globally.
For the complete reference on NASA ICESat-2 CLICK HERE.
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