Mapping forest diversity from space

Monitoring of biodiversity and its changes represent a major challenge for modern society. The monitoring of biodiversity is particularly of concern in forest ecosystems as these provide critical ecosystem services which are highly susceptible to deforestation, pests, pathogens, and abiotic stressors.

Our ability to monitor biodiversity and its changes over large spatial extents is fairly limited by traditional field surveys due to financial and logistic constraints to access remote areas. This research project, which was a part of my postdoc and current research, seeks develop a framework for mapping multiple dimensions of forest beta diversity (i.e., taxonomic, phylogenetic, and functional) over large spatial extents using spaceborne spectroscopy to further disentangle its composition by examining forest types, lineages, and plant traits. This research integrate forest inventories from the Forest Inventory Analysis with observations from DESIS and EMIT to map forest diversity at large scale. This study has been carry out encompassing the Eastern of U.S., but we seek to spans it further. This research is has been supported by NASA through Jeannine Cavender-Bares as PI. We have a manuscript in preparation.