NASA Applied Sciences

Mountain Pine Beetle (MPB)-induced changes in forest structure and hydrology are currently not accounted for in available fire management tools, but add significant complexity to fire management operations and pose a serious threat to firefighter safety. Using fused MODIS/Landsat data, we will develop a system...

Conservation management for salmonids (trout + salmon) as for other taxa often requires decisions on the allocation of scarce resources. These decisions are typically supported by spatial prioritization schemes that seek to identify those populations with the highest chance of persistence under current conditions, and...

We will develop an Adaptive Ecosystem Climatology (AEC) to provide a flexible, on-line tool for ecoforecasting applications; it will meld observations collected by amateur observers (crowdsourcing), Earth Observation (EO) satellites, archived in-situ data, and output from a state-of-the-art, data assimilative, coupled bio-optical-physical ocean model system...

The long-term goal of this project is to develop data critical to wildland fire modeling and response in the Northern Region of the US Forest Service. The project directly supports the Societal Benefit Area Ecological Forecasting, which in turn will support decisions that affect other...

The objective of this proposal is to develop a practical and operational Decision Support System that could be used by the Jane Goodall Institute and partners to annually monitor and forecast chimpanzee habitat health in Africa. Understanding the relative condition, or "health," of chimpanzee habitats...

Conservation International has developed a suite of near real-time fire and deforestation monitoring and forecasting systems that channel satellite observations directly to national and sub-national government agencies, NGOs, and local stakeholders in Madagascar, Indonesia, Peru and Bolivia. A recent user survey supported the value of...

Birds are excellent indicators of ecosystem health. New Big Data approaches, which employ global networks of volunteers to gather data, and novel approaches to model and visualize species distributions over enormous spatial and temporal scales represent a game-changing opportunity for the conservation of bird populations...

The Adélie penguin (Pygoscelis adeliae) has been identified as a key indicator species of the health and status of the Antarctic and Southern Ocean ecosystem, which is currently threatened by commercial fishing, a growing tourism industry, and the effects of climate change. Despite its central...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Balancing sustainable ecological and economic objectives is a continuing challenge for fisheries managers. Many US fisheries harvest healthy target stocks, however, bycatch of non-target species is common, and can result in large-scale fishery closures. Technological advancements in remote sensing over the past...

Estuarine managers need ecological forecasting tools to prepare for the potential impacts of future climate change. In partnership with the NOAA National Estuarine Research Reserve System (NERRS), we will integrate Earth to in situ observations with a model of tidal marsh elevations to forecast spatially-explicit...