WWETAC Projects
Project Title: Assessment review of remote sensing technologies for threat detection
Principal Investigators: Lee Vierling and Jan Eitel, University of Idaho, Moscow, ID
Collaborator: Alan Ager, Western Wildland Environmental Threat Assessment Center, Prineville, OR
Status: Ongoing
E-mail Contact: Lee Vierling, leev[at]uidaho.edu; Jan Eitel, jeitel[at]vandals.uidaho.edu
Summary: A comprehensive literature review is needed to identify cutting-edge remote sensing technologies and techniques that may be suitable to remotely detect forest stress at its early stages. The project will also generate a shorter technology assessment briefing paper that will help managers gain a broad understanding of recent advances in remote sensing and potential applications for specific monitoring problems.
General Description: The Forest Service’s Western Wildland Environmental Threat Assessment Center (WWETAC) is exploring a range of technologies to facilitate wildland threat assessments to better understand and predict multiple interacting threats (e.g. wildfire, insects, disease, climate change, land use change). The prediction and monitoring of wildland threats is a complex problem that potentially requires multiple strategies and technologies. The core WWETAC projects concerning broad scale threat detection and mapping include: 1) the Modis early warning system under development by NASA, 2) CONUS Wildfire risk assessment, 3) broad scale multiple threat assessment, and 4) the threat mapping and internet data mining system. The broad goal of this work is to accelerate the detection and diagnosis of ecological threats, especially those that have cascading impacts.
WWETAC needs to look at filling voids in this focus area and integrating all the projects into a larger package of products for the threat detection and mapping focus area. The final product will be a taxonomy of threat detection technologies and a system to leverage them for users. The latter will include WWETAC applications and tools, as well as guidance to facilitate acquisition of systems beyond the scope of WWETAC (e.g. acquisition and processing of Landsat data). This taxonomic key will span a wide range of technologies and tools, from web, to remote sensing, to spatial wireless networks.
One major void in this focus area is a current assessment of remote sensing applications for threat assessments. Recent advances in sensor technology along with the emergence of new platforms may be creating some new opportunities for threat detection and monitoring. A synthesis or literature review type project at WWETAC has been proposed in prior years resulting in the review of red-edge stress detection by the ITD staff. It seems appropriate to incorporate this work into a larger systematic evaluation of remote sensing technologies and their application for threat assessments. Remote sensing has been used in an attempt to monitor forest ecosystems with varying success. Recent advancements in sensor technologies and new research findings may help to improve our ability to monitor forest ecosystems for stress. Findings by Eitel et al. (2010) suggest, for example, that multispectral LiDAR might be suitable to detect forest stress in its early stages. Other findings suggest that red-edge band (~ 700 nm) providing satellite data that has become recently available might improve our ability to remotely detect plant stress (Eitel et al. 2007).
Given the potential of remote sensing to monitor forest ecosystems and recent advancements in remote sensing technologies and research, a comprehensive literature review is needed to identify cutting-edge remote sensing technologies and techniques that may be suitable to remotely detect forest stress at its early stages. The review will be published in a peer review journal and discuss historical developments as well as future avenues of research that are needed to better implement remote sensing technologies to detect and monitor environmental threats. Barriers to practical implementation of various technologies will be discussed within the framework of federal land management agencies. This work will explore how the threat mapper, threat search engine, cloud computing, remotes sensing networks, and other novel detection schemes can be integrated for application by federal land management agencies.
Background Citations:
Eitel, J.U.H., Keefe, R.F., Long, D.S., Davis, A.S., and Vierling, L.A. 2010. Active ground optical remote sensing for improved monitoring of seedling stress in nurseries. Sensors 10: 2843-2850.
Eitel, J.U.H., Long, D. S., Gessler, P. E. and Smith, A. M. S., 2007. Using in-situ measurements to evaluate the new RapidEye™ satellite series for prediction of wheat nitrogen status. International Journal of Remote Sensing 28: 4183-4190.
Project ID: FY10AA78
