The Press-Dispatch
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Say Yes to Solar! Hoosiers have long made a living from the land, and today that includes farming the sun. Solar projects throughout Indiana bring $37 million each year to Indiana communities, plus substantial income to farmers who now include solar energy as a crop. Respecting our heritage – Building our future SUPPORT SOLAR! Sign up with Hoosiers for Renewables to learn more about how solar energy can support your community's growth: www.HoosiersForRenewables.com/pike Assessing global biodiversity with ears to the ground, NASA eyes in the sky By Steve Koppes Purdue News Service Purdue University professor Bry- an Pijanowski's research team will be working in some wild and remote places around the globe in the com- ing year. Pijanowski's sound-source sur- veyors will be equipped with mi- crophones, headphones and para- bolic reflectors to efficiently collect sound waves from the natural world. Their tools also include low-flying drones and sensors mounted on or- biting satellites and the Internation- al Space Station. The Purdue team is utilizing these resources to develop a global model of animal and plant diversi- ty and how it changes. They will al- so access Purdue's two crown jew- els of global biodiversity databases. One is the Global Forest Biodiversi- ty Initiative, a database that holds tree species inventories from more than a million plots of land. The oth- er database, at the Center for Global Soundscapes, contains more than 4 million audio recordings from most ecosystems on Earth. "We're using acoustic remote sensing to develop the animal bio- diversity model," said Pijanowski, center director and professor in the College of Agriculture's Department of Forestry and Natural Resources. He has, for example, maintained an acoustic sensor in the wetlands of the Purdue Wildlife Area since 2007. And from the Southeast Asian is- land of Borneo alone, he has more than 25,00 recordings that include sounds from 3,000 animal species. The highly transdisciplinary work requires expertise in ecology, so- cial sciences, engineering, statis- tics and the humanities. Project co- leads include Purdue's Kristen Bel- lisario, clinical assistant professor in the John Martinson Honors Col- lege; Jinha Jung, assistant profes- sor in the Lyles School of Civil En- gineering; and Jingjing Liang, asso- ciate professor of forestry and natu- ral resources. The NASA project specifically focuses on developing plant-animal diversity models for four different types of forested ecosystems. The work starts in the deciduous forests of nearby Tippecanoe County in In- diana. Pijanowski's team uses the ar- ea as its "sandbox," where they go for research training and protocol development. The other three sites are located in Tanzania's Miombo Woodlands, Mongolia's savanna and forest-steppe ecosystems, and the mangroves of the Sundarbans UNESCO World Heritage Site in Bangladesh. "The Miombo Woodlands is one of the largest forest ecosystems in the world," Pijanowski said. "The Sundarbans is the location of one of the most pristine mangrove sites in the world. Mangroves and estuaries are under great threat from climate change due to rising sea levels. And Mongolia represents a mixture of coniferous forests and grasslands, which are also threatened from cli- mate change." The project will extend the bio- diversity models of all four ecosys- tems to other long-term studies in Borneo, Southeast Asia; Costa Ri- ca, the Caribbean; Finland, north- ern Europe; and Patagonia, South America. The Purdue team's multiple da- ta-collection platforms include three experimental sensors on- board the International Space Sta- tion. "These are experimental sen- sors to map and create plant habitat models that we then calibrate with all the measurements we're making on the ground and with unmanned aerial vehicles," Pijanowski said. The space station's Glob- al Ecosystem Dynamics Investi- gation (GEDI) uses light detec- tion and ranging (LiDAR). The DL S (German Aerospace Center) Earth-Sensing Imaging Spectrom- eter (DESIS) is a hyperspectral sensor that detects species compo- sition and diversity spanning elec- tromagnetic frequencies from visi- ble light to infrared. And ECOST- RESS, a thermal sensor, detects the drought stress condition of plants. Two satellite systems comple- ment the space station sensors. These are the Moderate-Resolu- tion Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and Landsat, which de- tect fires in Tanzania that affect the habitat of chimpanzees, bush babies, monkeys and baboons. With these three space station sensors, the team gleans data on a habitat's structural complexity, species diversity and stress, which mesh with the global tree dataset. Drones flying 80 meters above the ground provide high-resolu- tion data (1-centimeter pixels) that allow the researchers to calibrate with the space station data. The team also conducts plant surveys at each location. Jinha Jung and his geospatial data science group handle calibra- tions and linkages among ground- based, airborne and spaceborne da- ta. "We need to be able to relate the images we get to specific locations that Bryan is visiting and record- ing sound to quantify biodiversity," Jung said. "We can generate very high-resolution 3D models of those locations." One task of Jung's group is to fill the gaps in the space station's Li- DAR coverage. Orbiting at an aver- age altitude of about 400 kilometers (nearly 250 miles) and moving at 17,500 miles per hour, the space sta- tion bounces the GEDI laser beam off the Earth's surface at intervals of about 70 meters. Jung's group also will create 3D models of all the NASA biodiversi- ty field sites and make the 3D mod- els available on the project website. The models will allow users to point and click on a site, zoom in and ro- tate the view in three dimensions. "We're going to embed record- ings so visitors can visualize the site in 3D, but they can also hear the sound, almost feel like they're actually there," Jung said. The NASA biodiversity project is part of Pijanowski's mission to re- cord the Earth. His chorus4nature. org website connects to his entire database of global biomes, the var- ious natural habitats where plants and animals make their home. "People can look at all of our sites in the maps of locations where we have studies," he said. "We describe all the biomes, all the different stud- ies, the threats to the biomes. We have a photo catalog of all the sites and videos talking about the sites and what we're doing there as sci- entists in action. Ultimately, we are trying to use the very best technolo- gy to solve some of society's grand challenges of species loss and cli- mate change. Being supported by NASA makes this especially part of being a Boilermaker; Purdue is the cradle of astronauts. Perhaps, with NASA's help, we will be the cradle of solving global biodiversity chal- lenges." NASA Tippecanoe Soundscapes study field team in the lab's classic "Are you listening?" pose. Shown (from left) are Gabby Kroch- mal, Francisco Rivas Fuenzalida, Aubrey Franks, Ruth Bowers-Sword, Samantha Lima, Br yan Pijanowski, Jinha Jung, David Savage and Jingjing Liang. D-6 Wednesday, September 21, 2022 The Press-Dispatch