Biodiversity insights take flight at ORNL DAAC South Africa workshop

Scientists and land managers interested in accessing the first dataset of its kind on one of the most biologically diverse ecosystems in the world were given hands-on tutorials during a recent workshop by researchers supporting the Oak Ridge National Laboratory Distributed Active Archive Center for Biogeochemical Dynamics, or ORNL DAAC.

The ORNL DAAC is the main repository of worldwide terrestrial ecology data gathered by NASA, including observations from a new campaign, the Biodiversity Survey of the Cape, or BioSCape, conducted with South Africa partners.

The campaign is the first to collect biodiversity observations from space. The project used airborne imaging spectroscopy and a laser-based remote sensing method called LiDAR (light detection and ranging) along with field observations across coastal and marine environments in the Greater Cape Floristic Region, or GCFR, of South Africa. The GCFR contains the world's greatest variety of plant species in a temperate region, and the third-largest number of unique marine species. The BioSCape campaign data are freely available on the ORNL DAAC website.

ORNL's Michele Thornton, ecologist and geospatial technical professional, and Rupesh Shrestha, remote sensing scientist, traveled to Cape Town, South Africa, to engage with users interested in utilizing the data for scientific research and education and to guide conservation efforts.

Their outreach was part of a five-day workshop held in mid-October. The meeting focused on providing tools to participants on utilizing airborne, orbital and field data on topics such as water quality, algal blooms, post-fire recovery, invasive species, biodiversity indices and plant functional traits.

The ORNL DAAC's sessions gave participants the skills to find, subset and visualize the various BioSCape field and airborne datasets as well as corresponding NASA Earthdata satellite datasets. Participants learned to wrangle LiDAR data, perform calculations and spectral diversity metrics, were introduced to machine learning and image classification, and instructed on mapping functional traits. Thornton, Shrestha and other presenters conducted a mix of lectures and interactive coding.

"There's nothing that beats personal interaction with users," Thornton said. "The users got to hear what the campaign focused on and why, how observations were collected and how to access and utilize data. Plus, it was a two-way street for us. We got a better understanding of what the challenges are for regional land managers, how data can meet their needs, and how we can make the information more meaningful and available to them."

Interested users can check out the BioSCape website for more information on how to engage with the campaign's data. Workshop content is available at https://ornldaac.github.io/bioscape_workshop_sa/, and at this DOI.

The workshop was a collaborative effort by the ORNL DAAC, BioSCape, the South African Environmental Observation Network, University of Wisconsin Madison, The Nature Conservancy, University of California Merced, University of Cape Town, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, or UNESCO.

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