Track: Workshop
Rupesh Shrestha
Environmental Sciences Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
The recent airborne- and space-borne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and lidar observations at both global and regional scales provide never-been-available sources of remote sensing data for terrestrial ecology research. Characterizing vegetation structure at scale is vital for understanding ecological pattern-process linkages and structural attributes can also be used as proxies for vegetation vertical structure and ecosystem productivity. NASA Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) provides valuable SAR and lidar assets freely available to the public. Those assets include the Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) level 3 canopy metrics and level 4 above ground biomass products, airborne lidar data (e.g, Carbon Monitoring System), SAR data from airborne platforms (e.g. AIRSAR and UAVSAR) and spaceborne platforms (SMAP, ALOS PALSAR, RADARSAT, Sentinel-1, and NISAR (starting 2023)) archived at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory Distributed Active Archive Center (ORNL DAAC) and the Alaska Satellite Facility (ASF) DAAC. In addition, integrating analytics with climatic variables such as the Daymet data archived at the ORNL DAAC, which provides 1-km gridded daily surface weather and climatology data over North America from 1980 to present, can improve understanding of terrestrial ecosystems. The objectives of this workshop are three-fold: (1) introduce different SAR and lidar data sources valuable to the terrestrial ecology research, available currently and in the near future from NASA EOSDIS; (2) present data techniques and workflows that ecologists can deploy to synergistically explore these multitude of data sources; and (3) showcase terrestrial ecology science applications that leveraged multi-source SAR and lidar data.