NASA’s Earth science data collections provide a wealth of information to aid in our understanding of Earth’s processes. The data are all freely and openly available at earthdata.nasa.gov; however, identifying, accessing, and using data on the Earthdata site can be complex, requiring expert knowledge of the datasets and the tools. To help users access, explore, and use NASA Earth science data, we have developed a series of data pathfinders.
Data pathfinders are focused on science disciplines and application areas, like biological diversity and ecological forecasting; they include direct links to commonly-used datasets from NASA’s Earth science data collections and to tools for visualizing, analyzing, and subsetting data, with options to save data in different file formats.
Results/Conclusions
The Biological Diversity and Ecological Forecasting Data Pathfinder is tailored for ecologists, researchers, land managers, and decision-makers interested in using NASA data to monitor biodiversity, as well as climatic changes that affect ecosystem services, vegetative health, and species migration, and to integrate that data into conservation efforts or decisions. While traditional field observations provide data on organisms and their environment at the local and regional level, NASA remote sensing data complement field data with environmental variables, such as temperature and precipitation, and vegetative data, such as canopy height and evaporative stress.
The Biological Diversity and Ecological Forecasting Data Pathfinder is divided into four parts: Vegetation characteristics and processes, biodiversity-related spectroscopy, human impacts on ecosystems, and species distribution modeling, using in-situ species presence data and remotely-sensed climatological or geological variables.
Come see how you can more easily integrate NASA data into your ecological decision making.